Well and Truly Grounded
By Ed Wischmeyer
There’s a trick to avoiding having the FAA ground you for medical reasons. Just like in telling a joke, the answer is “timing.”
In my latest case, the problem is scoliosis, meaning, that my spine is not straight, but rather looks like the ground track of a pilot landing with a tailwheel for the first time. That spinal curvature puts pressure on the nerves coming out of the spinal column (stenosis) and causes pain. I’m guessing that it could eventually cause full lack of functionality.
The king-kong fix for this is spinal fusion, meaning, the doctor opens his erector-set catalog to “implants” and gets all the metal bits and pieces to hold the selected vertebra in place until they can grow together, i.e., fuse. The downside of this is that with those vertebra rigidly affixed, stresses accumulate at the end of the fused region. A real world example is that on many sailplanes with extra stiffening around the spoilers, eventually, the paint cracks around the end of the spoilers, indicating the stress.
I’ve now had L-1 through L-5 fused, and on day 16, the healing is progressing well in my first person, if medically untrained, opinion.
So how do you do this kind of thing in a way that will minimize FAA hassles? My regular FAA physical was due to expire in January when the recovery may or may not have been complete enough to pass. So step one is to move up the FAA physical before the surgery, and I was able to get a second class, needing only to have glasses in my possession for near vision. I also got instrument current, so I will be able to become instrument current again based on recent experience, not an IPC. And I flew the RV-8 just to keep things current there.
I won’t be driving until I’m off the Percocet, and right now, my body does not need them every four hours, but their job is to keep you ahead of the pain, not to relieve the pain.
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Part of the major surgery routine these days to avoid deep vein thrombosis is inflatable leggings. The drill starts when the nurse opens the package and puts the plastic wrapper over the toes and end of one foot. The next step is to pull one stocking on over the plastic, up your leg, and then to pull the plastic bag out through the toe hole. Repeat on the other side. Then a large flap of tube-lined plastic is wrapped around each lower leg, secured with velcro, and plugged in to the power source. It’s not uncomfortable, and not distracting, but definitely curious.
Being a real man and a pilot, I referred to this as my G-suit.
Post-surgery, I got a back brace, an ingenious device that looks like a pro-wrestler championship belt, but with a pad in the back made of plastic around the rim and cloth in the middle. Permanent laces are on each side with pull-tabs, so it is easy to tighten and release.
The name G-suit already being taken, this is called the parachute harness.
A friend gave me a ride home from the hospital, and we had to stop halfway home so that I could stretch a bit. Also, L1- L5 were complaining about the vertical jostling of riding on the freeway.
Have you ever noticed that certified airplanes have seats with springs while homebuilts do not? I wonder if when I’m fully recovered, I’ll need seats with springs.
A side effect of the medications and everything is that I have lost about nine pounds these first two weeks. I hope I can get rid of another eight.
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Garmin finally put round dials on their new G3X Touch, the big screen version. They did it right by using the synthetic vision as the horizon depiction. They also let the turn coordinator in as one option, and that exposes a curious point–the turn coordinator on the glass cockpit comes from the same sensors as the rest of the attitude displays, so it “makes no sense” to have the instrument there. On the other hand, for pilots who use the turn coordinator to make sure the standard rate is achieved, this minimizes the transition.
If it were me, I’d put power gauges there as an option, with manifold pressure on the outside and tach on the inside, osculating, not concentric. They do have an option for a G-meter to go in that spot.
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A friend, a good friend, has flown west.
The ideas below are probably correct, and are presented in the hopes that they will keep some of the rest of us from going to our eternal reward prematurely.
My friend was, I believe, primarily a low lands pilot. He had just bought a plane in California and flown out to bring it back to the Midwest. The particular plane he bought is a very popular sport plane, but in my professional opinion, the controls are much too sensitive.
On his third flight of the day, he took off from an airport at a density altitude of about 7,700 feet and was unable to climb above terrain surrounding the airport. For whatever reason––turbulence, angst, control sensitivity, fatigue, lack of familiarity–the plane apparently stalled, maybe spun, from 200 feet, and my friend was killed.
This model plane is one that is on my do not fly list because of the handling, and my friend sent me a text message two days after I got home from the hospital, telling me that he had bought it. I wish I would have called him to talk about his purchase and his route home, but I was looped on much-needed Percocet.
