EP3 – 3 Important SAE Documents Explained

In episode three, we discuss some of the industry standards in testing aircraft lightning protection, SAE documents 5414B, 5412B and 5416A, and much more.

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Transcript:

Dan: Welcome back. This is episode three of the Struck Podcast. I’m your co-host 

Dan Blewett and I’m joined here by lightning protection and aviation expert Allen Hall. Allen how are you doing? 

Allen: Great dan how are you? 

Dan: I’m doing well. The quarantine is in full force. I’m not leaving my home except for a little bit of exercise and some very haphazard shopping. I guess but how are you guys holding up?

Allen: Well everybody’s home obviously. So the college is being done online and the local public school should be switching over to some sort of quasi online classroom hopefully next week. So the kids are gonna start some sort of school which would be good because they’re definitely not going back until earliest is May 4th. So we’re about a month away from that. 

Dan: Yeah and I was listening to another podcast this morning and one of the co-hosts she said you know my kids go to expensive private schools and she said it’s just it’s just not going well with the online learning. She’s really not been pleased. She said it’s just a poor experience so far and disorganized and granted I mean it’s not to point any fingers to anyone, this is a tough situation for teachers to grab all their stuff and suddenly go online, but you know I think it’s really just growing pains but she was bringing that up. They were talking about whether college students will get refunded or anyone will get any kind of tuition reimbursement. She said you know like we understand the situation, but at the same time not only are they not getting in person teaching but they’re also just not really getting a great experience in general. 

Allen: Yeah the thing we noticed was the room and board obviously got waived for in this case my son goes to Union College and they’re on a trimester system. So they were just about to start their last trimester and the room aboard has obviously been waived because there’s nobody on campus. But the yeah curriculum part we’re still paying for and I think at least at the college level it’s probably a little bit better at because they’ve been doing things like that for a while. A lot of things are online there but in the public schools it doesn’t tend to be that way. So they’ve got to change the way they deliver the curriculum and that that’s a lot of work to do. You know when you’re in front of a board talking in front of 20 odd kids that’s one way. But if you’re trying to give something audio, visual, presentable via zoom typically it’s a much different format to present information. So I can see why schools will be struggling with that. And I know that’s here what they’ve been doing is the teachers have been sending out essentially an email a day saying here are some things you can read or here are some activities you can do here’s some research you can do just to keep everybody active. It’s not required, no one’s getting graded on it, but it seems like the vast majority I would say probably 80% plus of the local kids are actually doing it. And the parents seem to be overseeing a lot of that obviously. But you know at least there’s some learning going on. We’re not just sitting at home watching YouTube or whatever the kids are doing watching tick tock probably. 

Dan: Yeah it’s hard. I mean it everyone was just thrown for such a loop and there’s gonna be growing pains you know. And teachers work so hard. It’s just a lot of transition I’m sure for them. All their curriculum just thrown into chaos. 

Allen: Right to change track right now. Well I’m curious to see how this is gonna work – if they’re gonna try to bring all the kids online at the same time so you got 20 kids coming into a quote-unquote Zoom classroom whatever that would look like. But we’re telling our kids hey it’s something that we’re gonna have to just work through. It may not be the best situation but at least you’re getting some learning in and taking it for what it is. It’s better than then in the alternate right now so have a positive attitude about it. 

Dan:Yeah absolutely I mean so many layoffs. So speaking of which, the aviation industry is struggling right now. So it sounds like based on a couple of news reports they’re serving they’re down about 80% you know typical traffic. So what’s your take on the current state of the airline industry? 

Allen: Well I’ve been reaching out to some of my acquaintances that are in the airline industry and support the airline industry. Roughly what it sounds like now is, in at least the United States, 75 to 80 percent of the flights are essentially either shut down or empty depending on the airline. International flights have essentially stopped for the most part. A lot of airplanes have been parked across the country. I saw a list this morning of all the different places and it has a long list. I think was in the Washington Post where they had listed all the places that airplanes have been parked at. The the consensus right now is that they haven’t really… In 2001, I’ll give you the comparison, in 2001 and 9/11 when that happened obviously they shut down all flights for several days in the United States. No airplanes. Everybody had just immediately land. So wherever they were is where they landed. And then when it picked back up again, there was a hesitancy for people to go traveling again and the airlines really suffered and they started putting airplanes in the desert. Basically mothballing them. Permanently mothballing them or selling them for scrap. That happened just because it took a longer time for the airlines to recover. In this case it looks like airplanes are pretty much in flying shape. They’re just parked somewhere. There’s going to be some changes though. A week ago it would seem like all the airplanes are going to be back online pretty quickly. And then this week the attitude changed somewhat which is disappointing. But I think what they’re talking about is that the domestic flights, at least in the United States. are gonna pick up relatively quickly. It’s gonna be the international routes which means the bigger airplanes, I’m gonna use Boeing as an example here, but like the triple 7 and the 67 and the 787, which do a lot of the long-haul carrying and are the bigger airplanes, are not going to be as popular. Just because there’s gonna be fewer international routes. So those airplanes may get parked and the older ones may get parked permanently, which is disappointing really disappointing.

Dan: So as far as Boeing’s fleet goes because you know for me as sort of someone new to this industry, how do they break down as far as you know all the call numbers: 727, 737. Which ones are the ones that are mostly for domestic flights? 

Allen: 737. 

Dan: 737. So yeah the max was gonna be the big new workhorse if it hadn’t had all of its issues 

Allen: It still will be. Yeah it’ll be the workhorse. It’s mostly driven by I think Southwest Airlines is probably the largest purchaser maybe Ryanair over in the UK there’s a largest purchaser of 737s but it’s such a workhorse. It’s like the 8319 8320. They’re such workhorse airplanes. They’re great domestic airplanes. You can pack them pretty full. They’re about the right size to get in and out of a lot of different airports. The engines have been upgraded over time so they’re really fuel-efficient. Those airplanes gonna be hard to replace with anything else. Those are the right planes for the right time. You’re gonna see a little more I think, based on fuel prices being so low, hopefully the airlines that have cash reserves are buying options on fuel. So they’re buying fuel at probably a 75% discount right now with all the oil prices as low as they are. So what you do is you say hey I’m gonna buy a bunch of fuel at this price and it just saves you buying fuel when it’s right back at normal normal prices. So Southwest Airlines was notorious for doing that probably 10-15 years ago. They had bought a ton of fuel options when prices were right and it saved them hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a quarter. The numbers were astounding because fuel prices are such a big driver in the airline’s profitability so when if they can gamble correctly on fuel prices, it just is a huge revenue source for them. And Southwest had done a good job many years ago. Now I wonder if other airlines have learned from that original Southwest experience. If they have cash sitting around, they going to start picking up some of those options and make themselves a little more profitable as they go forward. Obviously it sounds like a lot of the European countries are going to be providing some funds to the airlines. British Airways is probably one, obviously in the United States it’s going to be American Airlines maybe United. We’re all gonna be looking. Southwest sounds like they’re going to be asking for some money to try to tide them over and keep the employees quasi-paid. There’s a lot of furloughs right now in the aviation industry. Hopefully they’re short-lived