Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2024 i Flying

ELECTRA.AERO UNVEILED ITS canary yellow EL-2 Goldfinch eSTOL (electric short takeoff and landing) demonstrator at a special ceremony in June 2023 to present the concept and answer questions about both the technology and vision for its future use. According to the company, the aircraft represents the first use of blown lift that utilizes solely distributed electrical propulsion, allowing it to take off and land in short distances. The two-seat airplane engages eight motors and an internal hybrid-electric power generator to recharge its battery system. The company has the aircraft in a full flight test program, with the first flight taking place on November 11, as it works toward a nine-seat production model. The production version is expected to begin testing in 2025. In all, the company anticipates the final model…

IT HAS LONG been said that the private pilot certificate is a “license to learn” as it is the foundation of a person’s flying career. To take advantage of the so-called pilot shortage, many schools and independent instructors have adopted the check-the-box style of instruction, and when the applicant has completed the tasks listed in FAR 61.109 and passed their knowledge test, they are sent to the designated pilot examiner (DPE) for their check ride. According to examiners across the country, there is a trend of only half of the applicants passing the check ride on the first try—despite having logged the experience, they don’t know the material. And there are others who don’t meet the experience requirements for the certificate, which is often found during a review of the…

IT WAS SET to be the trip of a lifetime…a month in New Zealand. The plan included several weeks poking around the natural treasures of both the North and South Islands via campervan, then hiring a light airplane and flight instructor for an aerial exploration of the rugged Southern Alps. Having recently returned to humdrum, workaday life after three glorious years of sailing the Caribbean, my wife, Dawn, and I were eager to resume our previous practice of taking several big international trips per year. New Zealand was to be our most ambitious adventure of a jampacked 2020. Well, that obviously didn’t happen. The pandemic blew up everyone’s plans, and given the obvious jeopardy to my livelihood, the loss of our adventure barely registered. And then, as the world began…

WHO DOESN’T LOVE that new car smell? And if it’s in an airplane, even better. When George Mitri and his wife, Debbie, of Sky Comforts (www.skycomforts.com) presented me with the finished product of their hard work on the interior of our Piper Arrow, my first reaction was a gleaming smile. The fragrance of new leather that wafted out the open cockpit door was intoxicating. But more on that later. When the airplane was first purchased seven and a half years ago, the exterior paint condition and design was a little dated. Tongue-in-cheek, I told my wife that she would still look good in the airplane regardless. That remark garnered an eye roll, as many of my airplane-related costs often do. At that time, a complete paint do-over was not on…

THE ABILTY TO BANK is essential to controlled flight. Otto Lilienthal did it by shifting his weight, but for the much larger Wright Flyer the solution was to make one wing produce more lift than the other by twisting them in opposite directions. “Wing warping,” as this approach was called, was satisfactory for very slow airplanes, but faster ones required more rigidity, and by around 1908 or 1909 the idea had arisen of replacing part of the trailing edge of a wing with a hinged, controllable flap. Actually, a prescient Englishman, Matthew Boulton, had patented the idea in 1868, when airplanes were still a thought experiment. His invention had been forgotten, however, by the time real airplanes came into being. Despite the early invention of the aileron, wing warping continued…

IN FEBRUARY 2012, two pilots returning from a vacation trip to Bimini in the Bahamas found themselves obliged to divert to Key West because of a presidential temporary flight restriction (TFR) at Miami. The 172 they had rented was not due back at Miami Executive Airport (KTMB) until the next day, but the TFR was scheduled to end early that evening, and they decided they would clear customs and get dinner in Key West and make the 92 nm trip back to Miami afterward. Both pilots were in their early 30s and were Polish nationals. Both held FAA private pilot certificates based on their Polish certificates. They were relative novices, with 210 hours total time between them, only 130 as pilot in command (PIC). Neither was instrument rated, and only…

THE ROTORCRAFT MARKET has always set itself apart within the general aviation industry, not only because of the different production requirements to develop and manufacture a helicopter versus a fixed-wing aircraft, but also because the category takes a different kind of training and operational environment to attain a commensurate level of safety. FLYING took the opportunity to see what’s on the horizon in terms of both traditional helicopters and the red-hot powered-lift and eVTOL categories ahead of the Helicopter Association International’s Heli-Expo held in February at Anaheim, California. Bell 525 The Bell 525 (at right) proposes to bring the first fully digital, fly-by-wire rotorcraft to the civil market, and Bell Helicopter has been hard at work getting the program to the finish line down at its headquarters in Fort Worth,…

REPETITION AND DRILL for skill acquisition are an integral part of flight training, but they are only a piece of the puzzle. It is important that the learner understands how these skills are applied in the real world. One way to make this happen is to utilize an aviation training device (ATD), colloquially known as a simulator, for scenario-based training. The beauty of the ATD is that scenarios can be created and adjusted to compensate for the learner’s changing skill level. It can also be reset with a few keystrokes, providing a more expedient learning environment. Here are a few scenarios that you might find useful. Scenario 1: The Pattern The pattern can be very intimidating to a learner. It can also be dangerous when the learner drops the airplane…

I was cruising through my early 40s and itching to learn something new. As a fellow engineer at Northrop Grumman, I needed something that would challenge my mind, body, and spirit. There were two options on the table. I had just graduated with my master’s degree and was seriously thinking of taking the next leap of faith and earning a doctorate. But that was quickly overshadowed by my second option—my childhood dream of learning to fly. And I wasn’t disappointed. It did challenge my mind, body, and spirit every step of the way. What intrigued me the most about learning to fly was that it required mastering many disciplines. In other words, it’s more than just jumping into an airplane and learning stick-and-rudder skills. You have to become entrenched in…

IN 1909 THE WORLD’S first military airplane took flight. The Wright Military Flyer could hold two people and fly at 40 mph for more than an hour. It was designed as a reconnaissance aircraft, but it took only two more years for a heavier-than-air craft to be used in battle. A German-made Etrich Taube dropped the first bomb on Turkish troops in Libya during the Italo-Turkish War in 1911. Militaries are often the most eager early adopters of new technologies, and it makes sense that they would have seen human flight as an obviously useful tool for war. Prior to the Wright brothers’ magnificent invention—without which you would not be reading this magazine—wars were terrestrial affairs. The killing was, for millennia, up close and personal. Boots on the ground. Even…

HELICOPTERS HAVE fulfilled a broad range of civilian and military missions over the 85 years since the Vought-Sikorsky Aircraft Company in Stratford, Connecticut, flew the VS-300, thought to be the first practical helicopter. For the cover of FLYING’s March 1951 issue—a period in which we turned an eye in these pages toward military application of all aircraft—we featured the Sikorsky H-5 to highlight the model’s search and-rescue (SAR) capabilities. Today, the Sikorsky S-92 takes on the mantle for modern SAR and other missions—and the military remains one of Sikorsky’s biggest customers. Now owned by Lockheed Martin, the venerable vertical lift brand last fall notched 35 additional orders of its CH-53K variants (shown above) from the U.S. Navy, worth $2.7 billion, including units intended for the Marine Corps, to continue operating…

Joby Aviation glows with the shining health of an organization led by a vision drawn from childhood dreams. The California-born-and-bred company, founded by JoeBen Bevirt, feels clear in its purpose: to make the most challenging “last mile” of aerial transport between points an accessible—and quiet—reality. Bevirt thought up the premise for an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL) as he walked home from the last point a school bus could take him near his home in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains. Today, Joby is a roughly $4 billion-cap enterprise on the cusp of its type certification for-credit testing with the FAA on an evolution of the very vehicle Bevirt envisioned would lift him from that dusty bus stop into the peaceful meadow near his parents’ forest home. From a flying…

CONGRATULATIONS! You’ve just passed your private pilot check ride. Along with being free to explore the skies, you can now—if you so choose—wave goodbye to the staid, serviceable set of wings that got you there and try something a bit better suited to whatever dream it was that had you stepping through the flight school door in the first place. The wide world of aircraft is now open to you, but what can you actually fly? Part of being a good pilot is recognizing that sometimes our eyes are bigger than our skill set. While hopping into a high-performance World War II warbird is a great goal, it is probably not the thing to do while waiting for the ink to dry on that new certificate. That said, there will…

ONE OF THE UNANTICIPATED benefits of getting diagnosed with leukemia is the amazing generosity of your friends. JetVx president Mike Shafer, who has brokered my airplanes over the past 20 years, had a surprise for a group of us airplane nuts. If a car geek were to visit the Rolls-Royce factory, they might feel as we did while getting a private tour of Gulfstream Aerospace in Savannah, Georgia. We were met at the front door by Shafer’s friend, Jay Neely, vice president of law and public affairs at Gulfstream’s huge campus right on KSAV. It was a federal holiday, so we had the place to ourselves. Neely said he didn’t mind coming in on a day off because he loves showing off the place to fellow airplane lovers. “At Gulfstream,…

DO YOU REMEMBER briefly turning the magneto switch to the “off” position and back to “both” before shutting down with the mixture control? I guess I knew why sometime in the past, but truthfully I’d forgotten about it. And I can’t remember testing any applicants, in years as an examiner, who did it. But recently I read a National Transportation Safety Board report about a fatal accident involving a 42-year-old Cessna 182 parked on a ramp in Cleveland, Tennessee. What happened is important, I think, because so many of us fly elderly GA airplanes with key-style ignition switches that may be faulty and not know it. While his wife stood near the right cabin door, the husband performed a preflight check before their return flight home. She heard him just…