FAA Article on Certification & Performance

[Newshound]

Lessons Learned from Someone Who Walked Away

“I am quite confident that a test pilot can replicate those numbers [performance “book” numbers] in the factory airplane 50 percent of the time. I can also tell you that with my level of experience, in a 60-year-old airplane, there was a day I couldn’t do it.” Dave Swartz speaks from experience. Swartz is an aeronautical engineer with the FAA’s Aircraft Certification Service and a pilot. He’s also a survivor of a takeoff accident. As Swartz explains in his article “More than Math: Understanding Performance Limits” in the May/June issue of FAA Aviations News, “it’s really a mixed bag…One of my mistakes was taking the book numbers too seriously. They didn’t take into account the tailwind I didn’t know I had.” To read the full article and see the results of Swartz’s battle with performance limits, visit XOPA's KnowledgeBase. You can search for it find it under FAA Safety.