Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2020 i Plane & Pilot

So if you’re an aircraft owner who didn’t install ADS-B in your plane in time for the January 1st, 2020, deadline, you aren’t alone. Tens of thousands of other owners are in the same boat. Whether it was sticker shock, conscious choice, procrastination or some combo of those three, you’re faced with limitations on where you can fly your plane. We’ve held off from publishing this opinion until it was clear that no reprieve on implementation would happen at the 11th hour. The FAA has always maintained that there would be no extension, but the FAA has maintained a lot of things over the years. An Advisory Circular the agency released just before the winter holiday lays it all out in mind-numbing detail. But the chart on the facing page…

EAA OSHKOSH TO OPEN DOORS FOR FREE TO KIDS Thanks to a donation from Boeing, as well as a slight increase in adult ticket prices, children will be welcomed into Oshkosh 2020 free of charge. The move, which comes amidst an ongoing pilot shortage in the industry, aims to inspire the next generation’s interest in aviation. TEXTRON REDUCES WORKFORCE Textron Aviation, the umbrella company for Cessna and Beechcraft Aircraft, recently announced plans to lay off as many as 850 workers. The move comes after the company’s board approved a reorganization plan earlier this year and as the company continues development of key new products, including the single-engine turboprop Denali and the SkyCourier utility twin. MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIM MAKES A COMEBACK After languishing for several years without an update, a new…

Any way you look at it, CubCrafters is one of the success stories of American aviation in the 2000s. With a lineup of Experimental, LSA and Part 23 models, along with doing extensive refurbs of existing Super Cubs, the company has forged a place for itself in the world of backcountry flying while selling a lot of airplanes in the process. The founder of the company, Jim Richmond, who started things rolling in Yakima a few decades ago, knows every inch of the Cub, and, for the record, by “Cub,” I mean “Super Cub.” In fact, the name of the company might as well be “SuperCubCrafters,” because that model, and not the J-3, is Richmond’s muse. But more to the point, the founder and still guiding force has taken this…

Forty years ago, general aviation pilots were conditioned to rise through the ranks of ever-faster and more-powerful airplanes, eventually moving into those rarified models equipped with retractable landing gear. Folding the wheels out of the way was seen as a means of cutting down on parasite drag and looking cool when you buzzed past lesser mortals who were dragging their gear through the air. The pecking order even extended into the elite class of retractable-gear models. Beech Bonanzas and Cessna 210s, for instance, kept their gear snuggly buttoned up behind fully enclosing clamshell doors, while Mooney Mark 20 and Piper Comanche pilots displayed a bit of naked tire exposure in their open-wheel wells. Simplicity eventually won out at Cessna, and a redesigned Centurion with open maingear wells appeared in 1979.…

The client called from Buenos Aires and asked if I could find him a gently used, late-model Cessna Skylane, get it thoroughly inspected, annualed and have the avionics brought up to date, then ferry the airplane from my hemisphere to his. For better or worse, I get such calls for brokering and ferry delivery every year or two, and it’s always a delight to watch an airplane transition from a 5.0 to a 9.0 or even an occasional 10.0. The process can sometimes be long and demanding, not to mention frustrating, but since I’ll be flying the end product 4,000 or even 10,000 miles on what amounts to a comprehensive flight test and delivery, the end product had better be good. I once upgraded a 1976 Piper Lance—basically a retractable…

Loaded up, the XB-70 was more than a half-million pounds of pure sex appeal. With a six-pack of afterburning GE YJ-93 engines, wingtips and snout rigged to droop—the former for speed, the latter for slower speeds—the supersonice beauty-70 looked like it was busting Mach with the parking brake set and chocks snugged around the tires. It was a doomed design before North American even started cutting metal. The design was born from the Curtis LeMay school of logic that preached speed and altitude were a bomber’s best defense. But before it even flew, missiles brought it down, figuratively at least. As evidenced by the Soviets’ shootdown of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2, altitude was no longer a defense, and as technology improved, missiles could track faster and faster targets. Presidential candidate…

When you look back at the history of aviation, some aircraft types stand out as evolutionary dead ends, ideas that made sense at the time but got abandoned sometime thereafter, usually very soon thereafter. This was sometimes because of better solutions to the problem they seemed to overcome, like commercial gyroplanes, eclipsed by helicopters, or vertical takeoff jets, a nearly extinct segment today. Rocket planes are the poster child for this kind of obsolescence, as very high-powered turbojet, turbofan and ram jet engines have taken their place in the world, and the experimentation that they once allowed is more easily and cheaply done with other kinds of machines. Historically, rocket planes have had one huge advantage: They produce ungodly amounts of power for their size. The downsides of rocket engines,…

ACROSS 1 A long trip in this turboprop would be doubly so 4 Much-debated word in ATC clearances 6 Engine fairing 8 A rotating engine component 9 Easily misunderstood preposition for pilots 10 Storm’s center 11 Critical trait of control surfaces 15 1997 Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones blockbuster, for short 17 Exist 18 State of the Theodore Francis Green Memorial Airport, abbr. 19 Land of the brave and free 21 Undesirable state of navigation 23 Civil aviation controllers, abbr. 24 Freight weight unit 26 The Lancair model that begat the Columbia 27 The opposite of CAVU 29 An airplane of one’s ___ 31 What to do with luggage before flight 33 This term is more of a command than permission 35 Turbojets need it; rocket engines don’t 36 Aircraft lights…

“Cessna 1234, can you accept an intersection departure from Bravo, remaining runway, 5,200 feet?” the controller inquired as much as instructed. “Sure,” I thought. It’s plenty of runway. We actually based the Cessna 340 I was flying on that day at a runway that was only 3,900 feet long. So, yeah, I had enough runway. But should I accept that clearance, I thought for a moment. I actually declined and asked for a taxi for the full length. It’s a habit I’ve gotten into over the years, choosing instead of departing downfield, even when enough runway is available, instead of giving myself the full length of the runway for my takeoff. Is it really that big a deal? Most of the time, no. But when it is, it REALLY is.…

When Isabel Goyer of Plane & Pilot asked me if I could write a “Patey Twins” flight review of a new NX Cub from CubCrafters, I jumped. And by jumped, I mean I was excited but thought about it every day, like a high school student procrastinating on my report. This time to process really turned my mind more from my thoughts on the plane itself to my thoughts on the polarizing reactions to this new Cub with a nosewheel. I had documented my NX Cub flight feedback on YouTube, and the flood of comments came rolling in like a tsunami, leaving me a little shocked at the devastation some wanted to leave in their personal wake and reviews. I get it. After all, I belong to that virtual religion…

“Don’t apply for food stamps in uniform.” It was whispered quietly, during my first-week training as a regional pilot in 2007, but it was said with the hushed fear that someone had done just that and been caught shedding light on an industry many likened to a puppy mill. New-hire first officers were flying when they could and delivering pizzas, substitute teaching, and selling their belongings to get by. A lot of us made it, but many succumbed to economic realities and returned to their prior careers. There’s great news for pilots seeking a flying career now, though. What used to be a starvation existence at best is now a survivable job, with a bright future for those looking to start climbing the ladder to a major airline. Three years…

THE BACKSTORY When most people think of astronauts, they think of spacesuit-wearing, rocket-launched, capsule-traveling people who nowadays do way more science than aviating. In many cases, today’s astronauts aren’t pilots at all but, rather, scientists going to space to do their work. But such wasn’t always the case. All of the first astronauts were extremely skilled and accomplished fixed-wing pilots, and they were proud of it, too. The role of astronaut was going to be different from that of pilot, and the question of what makes someone an astronaut, or naut, became a thorny one. “In The Right Stuff, author Tom Wolfe recounts the pains those early NASA astronaut recruits went through to help the spaceflight agency create the very concept of an astronaut, most importantly by insisting that it…

I got to Juneau in April of 1976, after a long Econoline van ride from Florida. I was there for a job—I hoped. Back in those days, before the age of Facebook and Google, how was an aspiring bush pilot living in the tropics to find out about jobs on the other side of the continent? Trade-A-Plane, of course. I ran across an employment ad offering a list of air taxi operators ($15). I received a page of 25 or so names, addresses and phone numbers of air taxi operators. I shot off a few letters describing my experience—mostly hauling emergency repair parts from the Vero Beach Piper factory to Miami International in a Cherokee 6, some dual given in Cessna 150s, a few seaplane and tailwheel hours scraped together…

When a prospective pilot walks into our flight school at Sporty’s, one of the most common questions we hear is, “Should I learn to fly with steam gauges or a glass cockpit?” Like most questions in life, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but the prevailing wisdom suggests it’s better to start on steam and transition to glass than vice versa. Is that really true, or is that merely flight instructor inertia? After all, most CFIs learned that way, so it might just “feel right” to them. Two facts would argue against the conventional wisdom. First, almost every new airplane delivered today, from two-seat taildraggers to 300-seat airliners, has a glass cockpit. The battle in the marketplace seems to have been decided in favor of glass, and it wasn’t even close. Secondly,…

When an aviation icon is lost in an accident, there’s the expected period of grief, followed by some hand-wringing and, usually, numerous vows to honor the deceased hero or heroine by learning from what happened so that it never happens again. The NTSB’s files once again provide evidence that what sounds honorable and righteous often doesn’t translate into reality. An awful lot of people were shocked when legendary test pilot Scott Crossfield was killed on April 19, 2006, when his Cessna 210A crashed at Ludville, Georgia, after having flown into an area of intense to extreme thunderstorms, leaving the rest of us to ask how it could happen to such a highly respected and experienced pilot. The flight had departed Prattville, Alabama, and was en route IFR to Manassas, Virginia.…

It wasn’t exactly an “okay, Boomer” moment as Nathan Bishop calmly explained to me how he had just passed his commercial check ride without a complex signoff. Our airport kid hit the ground running recently with a dose of motivation as he powered through his instrument rating, then tacked on his commercial ticket just a few weeks later. Somewhere along the way, he mentioned his lack of a complex-aircraft endorsement, to which I stopped, stared and uttered some words that made me sound old and out of touch: “Wait, I thought you had to do part of your commercial training in a complex aircraft.” With only the slightest collection of random gray hairs, I may as well have become Clint Eastwood out on his front lawn with a Garand rifle,…