Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2019 i Plane & Pilot

First public showing: September 30, 1968 First flight: February 9, 1969, 50 years ago First commercial service: January 22, 1970 Launch customer: Pan Am Major innovation: First use of high-bypass turbofan engine Number of 747 models produced: 6 Number of 747s built to date: More than 1,548 by end of 2018 Wingspan of 747: 224.7 feet 747 wing sweep: 37.5 degrees Top speed: Mach .855 (Mach .90 for the 747-8) Top speed, typical airliners of the ’70s: Mach .78 Typical number of passengers 747-100: 276 Number of decks: Two Passengers, 747-8: 467 Max takeoff weight, 747-8: 987,000 pounds Slowest commercial 747: Mach 0.0—converted 747-200, JumboStay Hotel, Stockholm, Sweden Number of rooms: 27 Cost per night of the cockpit suite: 1,850 Swedish Krona ($200 USD) Worst aviation disaster: Tenerife, two 747s…

ACROSS 1 Large Florida aircraft sales and service provider 5 Major centers of airline flight patterns 7 O to a pilot 8 Rotating about the front to back axis 10 Roswell arrival 11 At OSH they’re red or yellow or green… 12 Airline that was ADS-B pioneer 13 Prefix for plane or built 15 Every pilot’s favorite color? 16 A plane that’s holding does this. 20 Suffix for joint when describing an airport 21 Component a new fuel might damage 23 Half 24 It controls climbs and descents in a helicopter 29 Mid continent state abbr. 30 This org. started in Hales Corners 32 First part of hawk or lane or wagon, etc… 33 Discontinued low-wing Cessna 34 Concentrate DOWN 1 Airscrews 2 What a nacelle acts as, for the…

Breitling Aviator 8 Curtiss Warhawk Edition Breitling recently released three new watches commemorating the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, the venerated single-engine fighter and ground attack aircraft that served in ubiquity upon America’s entrance into World War II. All three editions feature a matte-finish military green dial encased in stainless steel. The faces feature easy-to-read Arabic numerals and hour and minute hands, as well as a red pointer. The Aviator 8 B01 Chronograph utilizes the company’s in-house Breitling Manufacture Caliber 01, which features a power reserve of approximately 70 hours. The other two models, the Aviator 8 Chronograph and the Aviator 8 Automatic, rely on Breitling Caliber 13 and Breitling Caliber 17, respectively. All three watches include a military green strap, while the two chronographs can also be fashioned with a stainless-steel…

I was 8 years old when I discovered one of my father’s secrets—he had taken a few glider lessons after he landed his first job. My father grew up as a farmer in India. He was 14 when he lost his father; as the eldest of four kids, he had to support his family. Years of drought made life difficult in his village. So he turned toward the nearest city to study and get a job. He dreamed of becoming a pilot, but he could not complete his training because money was tight. Ever since I discovered his unfulfilled dream, the idea of flying a metal bird through the air amazed me. There was a mystery and thrill surrounding the experience of piloting an aircraft. I fulfilled my dream as…

“If you’re going to fly low,” said my first flight instructor, “you had better know how to do it right.” We then cranked up the old Aeronca Champion and went out for a low-level dual excursion around the countryside. As I found out during his pre-planned route, things looked different from a traffic-pattern perspective. We didn’t break any minimum-altitude rules, we just didn’t climb up to the usual 2,000-feet AGL cruising level. For his training objective, flying at 800 feet or so was low enough. Why would you ever fly so low? As he explained, it might be necessary to stay that low just to remain in VFR conditions when the weather suddenly collapses and you need to turn around and get back home. And we occasionally participated in Civil…

We treat satellite-based approaches like they’ve always been around, but there was a time when you had to ditch the magenta line when it was time to get ready to land. The early days of GPS and IFR were really odd. As a new IFR pilot, I flew under instrument flight rules like most GPS-enabled instrument pilots of the day, by cheating at it. I didn’t technically cheat, I guess. En route I’d dutifully tune the VORs that defined the clearance route and watch the needles do their dance as the signal ebbed in and out…not that we knew which part was in and which was out, though we hoped the part that seemed most stable was the correct course line and the deviations were just that, errors, and not…

VIRGIN GALACTIC FLIES FIRST PASSENGER Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship VSS Unity set a new speed and altitude record during its second flight into space, which carried a passenger onboard for the first time. During the flight, in which VSS Unity carried NASA research payloads, the spacecraft reached an apogee of nearly 300,000 feet. BRS PARACHUTE NOW AVAILABLE FOR RV-10 Van’s RV-10 fliers can now place orders to purchase a BRS parachute for their homebuilt, BRS Aerospace recently announced. The systems can be installed directly by the aircraft builder and will require between 48 and 78 hours of installation, depending upon aircraft systems. INNOVATIVE PROJECTS COMPETE FOR 2018 COLLIER TROPHY The National Aeronautic Association recently unveiled the 11 technological marvels that will vie for the 2018 Collier Trophy, the winner of which…

Matt was nervous; that is to say, he was like every other flight student who has reached his solo stage check. He stood beside his Piper Cadet, putting on a brave face as I approached, and he was sweating. Of course, in the Florida sun, I was sweating too. Our very regimented flight academy mandated uniform shirts and ties even on August afternoons. On this afternoon, the humidity gave one the unshakeable sensation of swimming on dry land. I gave Matt a wide grin and patted his shoulder to emphasize my goodwill. It didn’t do much good. Despite the fact that I was the kindest and fairest check airman in the whole wide world, something in my appearance must have been intimidating. Nothing would assuage Matt’s fear. Had I been…

The home stretch of the quest for a helicopter rating add-on to my airplane commercial was the most intensely challenging and rewarding aeronautical experience I have ever had. Fifty-plus years and several thousand hours of flight experience—time that included crop dusting, bush flying in Africa, King Air charter work in the Northeast, advanced glider aerobatics, hang gliding, ownership of a Taylorcraft, a Navion, two Skybolts, a TriPacer and a Clipper—had subdued my wonder somewhat and fostered a familiarity with flying that rightfully belongs to birds, not men. My love of flying was beginning to fade toward complacent affection. Needing to add some spice to a time-worn passion, I felt beckoned toward learning the helicopter with an ever-increasing persistence I couldn’t ignore. So I took action. In Part One, I met…

WE’D LUCKED OUT. It was a gorgeous winter afternoon in Sebring, Florida, a comic book periwinkle sky, just an insinuation of wind, and, I imagined, the kind of visibility from up higher that would allow one to make out Vero Beach on the Atlantic coast and then, upon turning, spy Sarasota on the Gulf Coast on the other side of the famously flat peninsula. It was, in short, the kind of day that comes around too seldom in Florida in January, so when it does, you just have to go flying. And that was the plan. Across the field there was, indeed, plenty of flying going on, aircraft strutting around the pattern in the daily flybys at the Sport Aviation Expo: a yellow gyroplane zooming down and rising back up…

Just ahead, the windshield separated a cold, murky night from my relatively comfortable perch in the flight deck of the Airbus. As the runway lights in Boston flashed past faster and faster, I scanned the instruments while the captain, who was flying the plane this leg, had his eyes outside. “Eighty knots. Power set,” I called. As we passed 100 knots, my half of the panel went dark. My flight instruments and much of my ability to monitor the aircraft’s systems all evaporated in a flash of the screens. It took a moment to process what happened, and then I had to vocalize the situation. Because the pilot’s eyes were outside, my interpretation was his connection to the instrument panel “Lost my screens. Engines still making power. Still accelerating.” “Continue,”…

San Jose, Costa Rica, is sometimes referred to as the California of Central America. That’s either a compliment or an insult, depending upon your political bent. I made perhaps a dozen trips through San Jose when I was delivering airplanes regularly to points farther south. Many of these deliveries were crop dusters destined to help suppress coca production. We could usually tell which airplanes were intended to kill coca plants by the armor plating surrounding the pilot. I was happy I was only delivering them and not flying them above the cocoa fields. It was the third day of my trip south and a welcome day off. The weather in the Gulf of Panama was growling and blowing, and the winds were on the nose instead of the tail. That…

When a single-engine Short S312 Tucano disappeared from radar on June 22, 2015, it did so in more ways than one, even though the pilot who was killed happened to be a two-time Academy Award winner who was among filmdom’s most prolific and sought-after music composers, James Horner. He was 61 years old and was survived by his wife and two daughters. There were the initial news coverage and period of entertainment industry mourning, followed by what seemed to me to be a loss of interest in the accident except, perhaps, on the part of NTSB investigators, manufacturers of the aircraft and its components, and family members. It was a little over two years before the NTSB published its final report on what happened. For many members of the general…