s a student pilot, longer ago than I care to talk about, one of the first things I was told,

For I

I was, if an approach to a landing didn't look good, simply "go around" and try again.

During my career as a flight instructor I endeavored to imbue in my students the value of a "go around." Knock on wood, none of my students have, to my knowledge, landed long and wrecked an airplane. I owned and operated a flight school at a small field in California, and the most fun you could ever want to have was watching weekend pilots take off and land at that field. On weekends, when we had a spare moment, we would take our lawn chairs out to a shady spot beside a hangar and let the spectator sport begin.

This airport was, and still is, famous for wind that encourages pilots to dig out their cross wind landing technique. Wind generated from the desert increases in speed as it approaches the airport. Two hills near the west end of the airport cause the wind speed to increase even more because of a venturi effect.

One Saturday in particular, a small homebuilt took to the runway for a turn in the traffic pattern. This airplane, if that's what you want to call it, was hauled to the airport every weekend on a small flat bed trailer. The pilot put the

wings on with a couple of bolts and then squeeze into the cockpit. The wing span was a total of about twelve feet and the open cockpit was barely large enough for a person to sit in. The "windscreen"-if it could loosely be called that came to the pilot's waist. The pilot rose above the fuselage, into free air, at least three feet, bringing to mind Gulliver amongst the Liliputians.

The pilot took off quite successfully and flew into the traffic pattern of a runway that was 3,000 feet long. Approaching for a landing with a cross wind, we could see that he was going to land about half way down. the runway. Now granted this is a very small aircraft and it should have been able to land and stop in a very small space. (I don't think that the approach speed was greater that 35 or 40 miles per hour.) However, no such luck prevailed.

The pilot gunned the small plane's engine, and I thought he was going to go around for another try. Then he reduced power and started down again about three quarters of the way down the runway. OK, so he still could make a landing-maybe. The pilot gave the little plane power again and we all thought that he would go around for sure this time.

Nope, he didn't make it. The next thing we all knew was that the airplane was caught up at the end of the run

way in a fence about three feet tall.

The pilot was not hurt, because the tail was held suspended in the fence, but he was sure red in the face. The airplane was righted by a few helpful folks and the pilot taxied off to try again another day.

Some of us have all been in this pilot's shoes at one time or another. We might take a chance on making a long, maybe too long, landing rather than face the imagined disgrace and embarrassment of the dreaded go around. One pilot I know of ended up with the nose of his airplane nestled in a chain link fence. His excuse was that he felt that the controllers at that airport were too busy to handle a go around. Some excuse, huh!

I have been in airlines that have opted to use their go around procedure when approaching an airport and ending up too high on the approach. I suppose that they had to answer to their boss, but I am here to tell you that I would rather that they had gone around and made a safe landing.

Trust your instincts and rely on your pilot training and go around, if necessary. It could save you some real embarrassment and maybe save your life too.

Patricia Mattison is the Safety Program Manager at the Juneau (AK) Flight Standards District Office.

he epidemic of obesity is now a crisis. It is one of the major public health problems in the country. About 300,000 deaths yearly are a result of complications of obesity; second only to smoking, which causes about 420,000 deaths yearly.

Medical problems associated with obesity include heart attack, stroke, gout, diabetes, gallbladder disease, arthritis of weight-bearing joints, depression, fatigue, breast and uterine cancer, hypertension, and increased risk of falls and accidents. Add to this decreased self-esteem, less success in the workplace, and even public scorn and ridicule for gross obesity. Pilots may not be able to fit into the cockpit. There is no definite FAA regulation about obesity, but this is left to the AME to determine if obesity is a factor in safe operation of the aircraft.

Many articles use the Body Mass Index (BMI) to identify obesity. There are several ways to measure lean body mass. The only accurate way to define obesity is to measure actual body fat content by immersing the entire body in a tank of water and then making mathematically calculated measurements. This is scientifically correct, but certainly not practical. A Body Mass. Index (BMI) over 27 may indicate that one is overweight; if it is over 30, one is probably obese; a BMI of 25 is normal. Under 18 is abnormal. One problem with the BMI is that muscular people (muscle weighs much more than fat) might have a falsely high BMI. All lean, muscular contestants in a physique contest would have an abnormally high BMI.

The real value of the BMI is to compare population weights over the

by Glenn R. Stoutt, Jr., M.D.

years. Records of our weights and heights from past decades are readily available from insurance companies and hundreds of other sources. In 1960, 10 percent of our population was considered overweight; that figure has now reached over 32 percent. We are the fattest nation in the world. Forty percent of obesity is genetic (but still responds to diet and exercise). As a population, we are fat-and getting fatter-not from a sudden appearance of a "fat gene," but because we eat huge portions of calorie-laden fast foods, snack constantly, and get junk food from vending machines and just about every store we enter. We drive cars instead of walking or biking. We are couch potatoes.

Bookstores are filled with best-selling books on weight reduction. Some are "junk science" moneymakers, others have a gimmick that is blown up to about 300 pages and $25.

The food pyramid diagram by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, may be the most valuable one source of nutritional information ever devised. It contains most of the information you will ever need to know about your diet. It emphasizes food from five food groups. Note that-contrary to what we were taught years ago-complex carbohydrates should make up over 50% to 60% of our diet.

This is not junk science. Every major health organization endorses the food pyramid. Our basic diet should be about 15 percent protein, 20-30 percent fat (mostly unsaturated), and 5560 percent carbohydrates (mostly complex carbohydrates). The popular diet books merely juggle the food percentages instead of just lowering calories by shrinking the pyramid and

keeping the proportions the same. Some of the books recommend dangerously high proportions of fat and high protein. Anyone will lose weight on these diets, or on just about any diet, if followed long enough. Even if you eat half a stick of butter and two hamburger patties for each meal you will lose weight. But you will have way too much fat in your diet and go into a state of ketosis-also dangerous for your body. No one ever got into poor health by lack of sugar. The bottom line is to use the proportions recommended by the food pyramid and forget all the hype. And exercise, exercise, exercise! Even walking 30 minutes every day will do wonders.

Here are the food groups, with some choices for World Cup Champion in each category:

• Bread, Cereal, Rice, and Pasta
(the mainstay of your diet):
Bread (especially whole-grain
breads), oats, rice (brown rice is
best), macaroni, spaghetti. Try
unsweetened whole-grain
breakfast cereals and add a little
artificial sweetener.
Vegetables: The winners are Irish
potato, sweet potato, broccoli,
spinach, carrots, squash, cauli-
flower, and green peas.

Fruits: Apples, oranges, grape-
fruit, bananas, watermelon, apri-
cot, prunes. (Consider vegetables
and fruits in the same category
nutritionally.)

Milk, Yogurt, Cheese: Best are skim milk, no-fat yogurt, and lowor no-fat cottage cheese.

• Meat, Poultry, Fish, Dry Beans, Eggs, and Nuts: Lean meat, about the size of a credit card and about as thick as your finger,

once a day; turkey is a good choice. Beans: lima, kidney, Navy, black, pinto, and black-eyed peas. Three or four eggs a week. Most nuts if they are unsalted. Salmon, cod, halibut, and tuna are excellent fish selections.

Fats, Oils, and Sweets: Bad news. Use sparingly. (Salt, sugar, and fats are the worst things you can eat.) The best oils are olive oil and peanut oil, followed by corn, safflower, soybean, and sunflower. Skip any saturated oils or fats.

Thousands of articles and books have been written about obesity and diets. The truth is that weight control is a simple matter of mathematics. There must be a balance between energy expended (metabolism and exercise) and energy consumed in the diet. Any remaining calories (energy) not used are stored as fat. The laws of thermodynamics cannot be changed.

Yours for good health and safe flying,

125

an's earliest airplanes used skids as landing gear. It wasn't long before wheels were attached to the skids. Since that time, there have been various airplane designs with great progress and attention given to the landing gear. One improvement was the invention of retractable landing gear, which was a result of man's quest for more speed. However, with the invention of retractable landing gear, came mechanical problems in extending the landing gear.

The gear handle is placed in the down position. One green. Two green. Two green was it! What now? The pilots is now faced with many decisions, when one (or more) gear(s) doesn't extend. Land gear up? Land

by Harry Kraemer

on the runway or grass? Foam? These are just a few of the considerations pilots are faced with when a gear problem arises.

Not much has been written on this topic. One reason may be that it is hard to test any theory or recommendations. Who wants to land a plane gear-up or partial gear up to test a theory? My research led me to the FAA, NTSB, and NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) in an attempt to find out more about this problem.

One thing that a pilot can do is to try to prevent problems (specifically, extending the gear). A good percentage of aircraft landing gears are operated electrically. Hydraulics is usually involved also. When an electric mechanism is involved, any sign of an alternator or generator (as indicated by a

gauge or other source) problem may lead to a gear extension problem. Loosing an alternator or generator means that your only electrical supply comes from the battery. It will only be a matter of time before battery power is depleted. I have reviewed the one hundred most recent reports involving gear up incidents (from NASA's data base) and a large number of those were attributed to an alternator or generator failure that the pilot did not notice until it was time to extend the gear. By this time, the battery was also drained. Your scan should include the entire panel. At the first sign of an electrical problem (loss of an alternator or generator), your focus should be to trouble shoot or determine the cause. If it can not be corrected in a relatively short time and your gear system relies