Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2019 i Plane & Pilot

I sometimes hear non-aviation folks asking aloud why pilots “like reading about crashes so much?” We don’t. In late June, a Beechcraft King Air 350 crashed on takeoff at Addison Airport, seven miles north of Dallas Love Field. The two pilots and all eight passengers perished in the crash. The NTSB is investigating and is months away from issuing a statement of probable cause. But accidents of this type—an apparent loss of control on takeoff—are most often the result of the loss of power in one of the engines at a high angle of attack and resultant roll into the good engine and into the ground, or in this case, into the side of a hangar. On the day of the crash, I covered the story on planeandpilotmag.com and for…

Not long after I moved to the rural area where I now reside, an experienced pilot who lived just down the road from me departed from our local airport in his single-engine airplane with his 9-year-old daughter on board. The marine layer that visits the airport almost daily at that time of the year had yet to dissipate, and the experienced but non-instrument rated pilot must have been in a hurry, taking off in zero visibility. The flight lasted no more than a couple of minutes because shortly after he departed, he, his young passenger and the crinkled airplane were found in the nearby riverbed. Neither the knowledge of that accident nor my having attended the emotional funeral kept me from taking flying lessons a couple of years later and…

ONE OF THE GREAT TRUTHS of flying is the admonition, “He who stops getting better stops being good.” We must constantly strive for the perfection we may never achieve, just to keep our skills sharp. Becoming satisfied with being almost good enough means that we’re no longer trying to stay on centerline, on altitude or on track. Why bother? Because if we don’t practice at every opportunity, then the skills we need at a critical juncture won’t be there. I recall reading a story from 50 years ago about a transatlantic cargo flight that had already passed its point of no return when the weather in all of Europe within reach of the plane’s range unexpectedly went down to zero-zero in fog. The flight deck crew knew the situation was…

OVERVIEW: Back in the early 1950s, when the Lockheed C-130 Hercules (now the Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules) was created, it was unlikely that anyone knew what a huge impact on aviation history this transport/jack-of-all-trades would have on aviation. Surely no one would have suspected that the new plane, a replacement for 10-year-old designs from World War II, would last more than 60 years throughout the jet age and still be going strong. But it is. BACKGROUND The impetus for the development of a new cargo/troop transport plane was the need for one that wasn’t as limited as the existing models at the time. Those included the Curtiss C-46 Commando, the Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar and the Douglas C-47 (DC-3) Dakota/Skytrain. The Air Force’s new transport was to have more…

EVIATION LAUNCHES ELECTRIC AIRPLANE An Israel-based start-up called Eviation recently unveiled a non-flying prototype of its nine-seat electric commuter, whose unique design includes a rear pusher-motor as well as dual motors on the wingtips. The company says the airplane, dubbed Alice, is slated to fly for 650 miles and at 240 knots. TESLA VET TAKES HELM AT CIRRUS Zean Nielsen, a former high-level executive at James Hardie and Tesla Motors, has replaced Cirrus Aircraft’s co-founder, Dale Klapmeier, as CEO of the Duluth- and Knoxville-based manufacturer. Klapmeier, who founded Cirrus with his brother Alan in the 1980s, will move into an advisory role at the company. DAHER PURCHASES QUEST AIRCRAFT Daher is broadening its footprint in the GA world with the acquisition of Idaho-based Quest Aircraft, maker of the Kodiak 100…

“Hmm, did you just see that loss of RPM?” I asked the friend of mine who was flying with me. He hadn’t noticed. But I did. In fact, I was no longer able to produce a full normal 2450 RPM for cruise flight. The Stinson was only making about 2200 RPM. It was running smoothly, though. A quick check of carb heat and magnetos generated no changes. I quickly decided to take advantage of a close grass runway and put the aircraft on the ground, where we tried a little additional diagnosis, to no avail. I then called a friend for a ride home, during which I contacted my mechanic and asked for his assistance in the near future at diagnosing why the aircraft was experiencing a noticeable loss of…

“We had been in the air around 30 minutes when my wife and I felt the engine shudder. Hmm, what was that? Must have been a slight chop from forecast turbulence, we thought.” “Mayday, mayday…” I guess no pilot expects to utter those words, but on this warm and sunny November day the words, unfortunately, were quite appropriate. My wife, two daughters and I got up bright and early one Saturday morning for our vacation to Orlando, to be followed by a week in Disney World. A storm had passed through the previous evening and left a clear sky across our proposed route from Hanover County (FOSF) to Kissimmee (KISM) with a lunch stop in Savannah, Georgia (KSAV). It was fairly breezy on the ground and winds at altitude were…

CAVU conditions are rare in Greenland. Today, that’s exactly what I have in northeast Canada and the giant ice cap continent. Three hours ago, when I departed Goose Bay, Labrador, with the forecaster’s promise of clear skies and tailwinds spelled out in the weather package, I was more than a little dubious that Mother Time and Father Nature would relinquish their grip on southern Greenland just for me. Fortunately, the tailwinds were there, and the usual weather wasn’t. Now, the GPS suggests I’m 90 miles out from my destination of Narsarsuaq, and, sure enough, I’m well ahead of my how-goes-it, flight-planned time en route. From 17,000 feet, I can see all the way down to the southern tip of Greenland and well north toward the capital city of Nuuk. If…

BACKGROUND On July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747-131 with 230 passengers and crew on board, exploded mid-air shortly after takeoff. The flight was scheduled to depart JFK International Airport for Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport at 7 p.m. EDT but was delayed by over an hour due to issues with ground equipment and a problem that gate agents had in matching luggage to one of the passengers. It eventually departed in dusk conditions at 8:19 p.m. Weather in the area was calm, with light wind, scattered clouds and visibility greater than 10 nm, so it’s safe to assume that weather wasn’t a factor. After takeoff from Kennedy, the pilots were issued a series of altitude and directional changes by ATC. The pilots’ last communication with ATC was…

Scattering cremated remains by airplane has been a labor of love for me and my family for the past 17 years. It started as a way to help a funeral director friend, but it has evolved into so much more. I am lucky to have found this opportunity that has given meaning and purpose to my flying. I grew up near the Fullerton Airport in Southern California. Watching the small planes flying overhead sparked a desire to learn how to fly. At the age of 17, I convinced my dad to take flying lessons with me. We would study together and chair-fly together, and then eventually we each got our licenses (I beat him by 11 days, but who’s counting?). I didn’t start flying thinking it would be anything but…

Airships. With that one word said, let me just add this: if you’re still reading, thank goodness. It’s not that lighter-than-air craft aren’t fascinating. They are, and there are some really crazy things happening with them these days. It’s just that almost no one knows that or seems to care. That apathy is born of the fact that for 80-some-odd years, the world has had little use for blimps. But if everybody has been over blimps for so long, then why are we seeing new companies and new ideas for new kinds of airships popping up in the past few years? Don’t these entrepreneurs know that there hasn’t been much spark in the segment since the Hindenburg horrified humanity when it went up in flames in Lakehurst, New Jersey, back…

IF YOU’RE A PILOT OR JUST AN AIRPLANE NUT, then you have almost certainly taken photographs of airplanes, probably lots of them. And it’s also likely that many of your efforts have been less than fully satisfying. No shame. Airplanes are really hard to photograph. There are, in fact, a number of built-in challenges when it comes to photographing aircraft, often making it easier to make mistakes than not. Here at Plane & Pilot, we see endless examples of what not to do. Some of these shots-gone-wrong contain multiple, glaring examples of how easy it is to ruin a perfectly good opportunity. There’s hope, however. If you know how to look out for the mistakes lurking in the weeds and if you understand how to look for the possibilities, you’ll…

In a 35-mm transparency I only recently discovered in my library, there’s an image of a red-and-white Mooney M20C in front of a hangar with an older couple standing in front of it. The best guess I’ve got is that it’s the couple who sold N5746Q to my late friend and mentor, Chris Smisson, a year before I was born. In the web of folklore told to me in the years I’ve been flying, the stories are snipped, short and incomplete, but the basic gist is this: Chris put much of himself into this plane over the years, spending many late nights at the Navy Flying Club’s hangar, wires spread everywhere and interior stripped, making 46Q into a great little traveling machine. Over time, he changed the windshield and wingtips…