How many aviation organizations should you belong to? As a member in good standing of the aviation community, must you pony up dues for both AOPA and EAA? And what other service organizations should you support in order the keep GA alive, much less vital.

EAA is in the process of testing that question. As you may have noticed—or maybe not—EAA is slowly repositioning itself to be a broader GA service, promotional and advocacy organization that also happens to champion the cause of homebuilding and experimental aviation, where its roots lie. This is going to be a tricky dance to watch because as EAA does this base broadening, doesn't it necessarily evolve itself into being more like AOPA? Won't it be going after AOPA's core constituency?

At the Sport Aviation Expo in Sebring last month, EAA's new prez Rod Hightower seemed to suggest that this isn't the case at all and that all of the alphabets are working together in a spirit of cooperation, agreeing ahead of time which one is best positioned to advocate with the government on various issues. Maybe so, but the reality is that all of us live in the Village of the Damned. Interest in GA and the ability to participate in it are eroding and the universe of likely participants isn't growing fast enough to replace attrition. Student starts and completions are in the tank, although the FAA seems to think this will bottom out and resume some growth before 2020. I hope so. But I'm also a realist.

Hightower said EAA wants to grow its ranks and is actually succeeding at that, with a membership of about 171,000. AOPA has about 400,000, but it's down from a couple of years ago. I don't know what the overlap between the two organizations is, but I suspect it's substantial. If it becomes less quirky homebuilder oriented and more of all-purpose joy-of-flight organization, EAA can likely sway quite a few of those 230,000-plus AOPA members to join. That's a good thing, because EAA—thanks to its grass roots ethos—is doing a credible job of pilot recruitment. In fact, it's about the only organization making a dent in the problem in a way that reaches the local airport. (I've personally participated in Young Eagles and plan to again.)

But as the two organizations become more alike, they risk losing their identity, especially EAA. When the new, redesigned and re-positioned SportAviation arrived this month, it struck me as a well-executed amalgam of AOPA Pilot, Air&Space and Flight Journal, with some hands-on technical meat thrown in. Nice, especially the tasty 9 by 11 format. But I already get those other magazines, for a reason. Why do I want another that may be different only by degree? I'm not sure I can answer that yet. Nor can I say if I'll remain a member of both organizations, as I have been for professional reasons for more than 20 years.

Like everyone else, I feel a certain duty to support these organizations, for I believe they perform important functions. But if they end up looking more or less the same, it's harder to justify supporting both.

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Because readers are interested in new airplanes and because most new airplanes are LSAs, I tend to fly a lot of those. I'm not complaining. They're fun, sip gas and I see pockets of innovation thanks to the streamlined standards under ASTM. All good. On the other hand, if you fly nothing but new LSAs, you tend to forget what a good airplane flies like.

Gipps GA8 Airvan click for a (much) larger version

George Morgan and Randy Juen stopped by last weekend to demonstrate this in the form of the Gippsland GA8 Airvan. They're touring the country in a new version of this Australian export called the GA8TC. It has a turbocharged Lycoming IO-540 and a bunch of other features that make it suitable for hauling people and cargo out of the outback, and not just in Australia, but all over the world.

The GA8 is a FAR 23 airplane taken to its most recent iteration, and it shows. FAR 23 has all sorts of requirements related to crashworthiness and aircraft stability designed to avoid a crash in the first place. Gippsland worked with the National Test Pilot School in Mojave to tweak the GA8's airframe and, as a result, it's one of the most superb handling airplanes I've flown in a long time.

What makes it so? Predictable pitch forces, docile slow flight and stall characteristics and the trim stability of a concrete block. The Airvan is so confidence inspiring that on a trial flight around Venice, I did something I would normally not think of doing: stalls and slow flight with five people in the airplane and a moderately hefty load of cargo. I also took it into a 2000-foot grass strip with obstructions, another thing I wouldn't necessarily do with my first flight in a 4000-pound airplane. The Airvan shrugged off this stuff without mussing its hair and made me look more skilled than in fact I am.

Most certified airplanes, when trimmed to an airspeed, will hunt around that airspeed as you change the power. But with the Airvan, if you trim for 60 knots indicated, the throttle becomes an elevator button. Changing power causes hardly any pitch disturbance so to stuff it into a short field, you just have to get the glidepath picture right with power. The airplane does the rest by hewing to the trimmed airspeed like paint sticks to a wall.

Rare is the LSA that can do this, even on a calm day where gusts don't disturb it. LSAs are supposed to have the same general stability characteristics as certified airplanes. Some do, some sorta do and others flat out don't. I've flown a couple that are neutrally stable. If you excite a phugoid, they'll happily hold the commanded pitch into a stall or a redline dive without damping. This presents on final approach as pitch changes with power and the need to constantly retrim to get the desired speed and descent rate. They're flyable enough, but not necessarily pleasant or easy to manage. Low wing loading doesn't help, of course, but that's only part of the equation.

Of course, an airplane like the Airvan is both heavier and more expensively tended to in development. (At $800,000, you'd expect nothing less.) Experienced airplane people often say that FAR 23 is a good guideline for making a safe, flyable airplane. I'd say the Airvan is living proof of that. Setting aside the cost, I'm quite confident I could solo a student in it in under 10 hours, if not less. With its boxy shape and slab sides, the Airvan isn't much to look at, but when the aerodynamics are as right as they are in this airplane, who cares?

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When Adam Evans sent me a link to this clever 3D video on historical events in aviation, it proved quite a coincidence. Since seeing Red Tails last weekend, I've been ruminating about great moments in aviation history and which I'd most want to have seen. So, let's suppose you find the magic lantern in the back of the hangar and out pops the genie with three wishes, all confined to great moments in aviation history. Which three would you pick?

For me, the first two are relatively easy, although picking the order isn't. The landing of Apollo 11 on the moon would be my first pick. Obviously, you couldn't be standing there on the lunar surface watching it, but the next best thing would be a fly on the wall in mission control in Houston on that hot July afternoon in 1969. Apollo 11 was by no means the most important event in aviation because its overall impact was neither long lasting nor particularly meaningful. But it certainly was one of the most inspirational events in the history of flying machines.

My second choice may be obvious: First Flight on December 17, 1903. I'm a long-time visitor to the Outer Banks and have been to the site of the Wrights' work many times. The event itself certainly had a more powerful influence on the arc of manned flight than did Apollo 11, despite the fact that it was merely one development in frenzy of research into powered flight going on at the time. The Banks were far more desolate then than today and the sight of that frail machine beating into a strong wind would have been breathtaking.

Now what about choice three? This one's not so easy. I finally decided on October 14th, 1947. Know the date? You should. That's when a young Air Force captain named Chuck Yeager flew the research aircraft, the X-1, beyond Mach 1. For me, the actual date and Yeager himself is less of interest than the entire period from about 1947 to 1959, when the X-15 flew. This was the golden age of high speed research aircraft and although no one knew it at the time, it provided the underpinnings for Neil Armstrong to plant his boot on the moon. Lake Muroc would have been an interesting place to hang around.

Last, a word about the video Evans sent. He's an instructional technologist at Utah Valley University, which has a lively aviation program. The video was prepared as part of project to build interactive media for training that goes beyond mere two-dimensional presentations.

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If there's anything inarguable in aviation it's this: The number one cause of accidents is loss of control on the runway, or what we call R-LOCs in our accident reporting. To be more accurate, R-LOCs are actually the result, the cause is some other factor related to the fact that pilots sometimes have a hard time landing airplanes. This has always been true, but it seems worse now than ever. If that's actually the case and not just a misperception, lack of flight activity is probably the culprit.

So how do you acquire the underlying skills to inoculate yourself against runway prangs or at least keep the skills fresh? We all know the answer. As an instructor, I've always subscribed to the theory that the more you test yourself in trying conditions, the better your skills will be when you face those conditions for real. It's too bad that more pilots don't do this, although a few do. The other day I was taxiing out for takeoff while a Taylorcraft, working the crosswind runway in a pretty stiff wind, did the one-wheel trick down the entire length of the runway, before recovering into a perfect wheelie for the last turnoff. "Show off," I said over the CTAF. He laughed, but what he was doing was both a pure celebration of skill and the kind of proficiency flying we should all do.

Our own inbred culture tends to discourage this sometimes. More than once I've been in the crosswind pattern only to have others on the CTAF point out the active runway is into the wind. They don't get that someone would actually land crosswind intentionally and spend most of an hour doing it. Some people will get downright snooty about it, but I try to ignore them, while adjusting my pattern to avoid a dead-ass tie at the intersection. The pilots who complain the loudest are probably the ones most likely to end up in a ditch.

The challenge in doing this sort of envelope expansion, so to speak, is to avoid having the cure be worse than the disease. The thing about risky training scenarios is that they can snap from benign practice to bent metal in the blink of an eye. An example is a night flight I took with my student, Jordan, last week. Returning to the airport and just entering the pattern, he asked what to do if the engine quit at that point. "Let's find out," I said, and had him pull the throttle to idle.

The only realistic play was a tight turn to line up on runway 31 with a touchdown well past the midpoint and with a slight quartering tailwind. It would require a fairly steep bank, at night, involving momentary loss of sight of the runway, then a careful judgment on whether we could land on the remaining runway without smoking the tires or overrunning. Pretty edgy stuff.

While he was setting all this up, I briefed him on the two principle risks: One was to avoid loading up the wings during the turns and the other was to avoid target fixation and not try to complete a full-stop without enough runway. I told him to take it right down into the flare and then he could decide if he could make the landing or go around.

When we lined up off an angled final, the sight picture was all red runway lights—the last 1000-foot markers. It looked impossibly too short. This is one of the trickiest visual judgments a pilot has to make, because it's all about speed and distance with constantly changing variables. You have to accurately estimate not where you are, but where you'll be. So I suggested we make the go around Plan A, the landing Plan B.

Most of us have had the experience of rolling toward the end of a runway and thinking…I'll never make this. Then, somewhere in the flare, the sight picture instantly changes and you realize you can make it with room to spare. And that's what we did. It didn't even require braking.

So the essential skill is to be able to make that switch without fixating on trying to force a plan that's simply not going to work. The people who do that are R-LOC victims; the ones who don't are less likely to have a tour through the tules. But you won't have that judgment unless you've seen it before so a little risk now is worth it to avoid a big risk—and maybe an accident—later.

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I suppose if you hold your nose, Red Tails might be considered a decent movie in a it-could-have-been-a-lot-worse sort of way. And I understand enough of how the entertainment business works to accept a certain artistic license so I wouldn't raise much of an issue about the pilots flying D-model P-51s instead of the C-models they actually flew. It doesn't really matter in the telling of the story anyway, but Red Tails' fatal flaw is that it doesn't actually tell the story of the Tuskegee Airmen.

It's really just a World War II fighter combat movie with an all-black cast and a veneer of racial tension when what I was futilely hoping for was a grittier story that illuminated the struggle these exceptional men went through to serve their country. Through dialog and plot devices, the uneducated viewer will get a vague sense of this but I think the word "Tuskegee" is uttered all of three times in the script.

But pilots are educated about the Tuskegee backstory, and I suspect if we're willing to forgive the film's technical errors and license with even the top-level bullet points of the story, we're probably not willing to be so generous with a script that just doesn't address a central part of the story: The Tuskegee program itself and what it represented. And speaking of the script, it manages a more or less steady trickle of truly horrid dialog, culminating in what will become, for me, one of the most ridiculous lines in all of film. When placing his pipper on a hurtling P-51, the German pilot of an Me-262 says, in subtitles no less, "Die, you African fool!" (I'm not making this up.)

In explaining his motivation for producing Red Tails in this interview, George Lucas says he shot it in the tradition of Flying Leathernecks and other World War II classics and intended it to read that way to the viewer. But this isn't 1942, and I think the device will be lost on most audiences. It was lost on me and I even heard him describe his intent. Lucas also contends that the only way to interest studios in marketing Red Tails was to sex it up with a bunch of — make that too much — stuff blowing up, burning and being shredded by machine guns. Even someone with the imagination of a turnip would see an unmistakable resemblance to Lucas' Red Tails' dogfight scenes and the X-wing fighters in Star Wars. The film could do with a lot less of that and a lot more character development that would inform audiences of what Tuskegee really was and what it means yet today.

Lucas and others have said the real point of Red Tails was to serve as an inspirational message for black teenagers, to show what can be achieved with determination, discipline and self-respect. Red Tails might do that, but I have a hard time believing it. I think audiences are sophisticated enough to parse storytelling not punctuated by stuff blowing up every 15 minutes. I know it can be done, because Men of Honor, about black Navy diver Carl Brashear succeeded brilliantly in doing this, all without relying on a CGI budget equivalent to the GDP of Honduras. Cuba Gooding Jr. was in that film too, perfectly cast as Carl Brashear. In Red Tails, not so much. His agent should forbid him to ever again accept a role in which he smokes a pipe.

So if you haven't seen Red Tails, should you? By all means. Lucas swears if the film succeeds, he'll shoot the prequel and the sequel which actually do tell the story of the Tuskegee Airman. What he's done so far doesn't quite get there. Here's to hoping the next film does.

A Thursday addition: Be sure to see the traveling exhibition called Rise Above produced by www.redtail.org. It will be at Sun 'n Fun and other venues this year. It has its own film and photos describing the Tuskegee program.

For readers interested, HBO's 1995 Tuskegee Airmen is relatively well represented in snippets on YouTube. Here's one that illuminates the barriers black pilots faced in 1942.

Click here to see an episode of Dogfights featuring engagements by the Tuskegee Airmen.

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