Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2021 i Plane & Pilot

With the passing of General Chuck Yeager late last year, America didn’t just lose a supersonic pioneer; we lost a symbol of an entire generation, the one defined in large part by World War II and our coming together as a country to defeat the rise of fascism on the European continent and in the Pacific. To many pilots, Chuck Yeager was the face of that victory, of that generation, which journalist, author and historian Tom Brokaw dubbed “The Greatest Generation” in his book by that same title. The real story is far more complicated than that, of course, as it always is with tales of heroes. Look no further than the history of the Tuskegee Airmen squadron for proof of that. That’s the nature of the American Experiment. But…

Checklists are an essential link in the safety chain at all levels of aviation. The checklist, like any success story, has many parents. However, the 1935 crash of the Boeing 299, the prototype of the legendary Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, is generally regarded as a key turning point. The 299, with a crew of five on board, crashed shortly after takeoff due to the pilot’s failure to release the gust locks, killing the pilot and a second crewmember. This innovation protected the tail surfaces from wind damage while parked by locking the elevator and rudder. Thankfully, the accident did not spell the end of the B-17, but it did highlight the need for a pre-takeoff checklist to ensure that these increasingly complex airplanes were operated safely. Flash forward to today,…

Battery-powered handheld radios are a staple of a pilot’s flight bag. Some remain buried under the barf bags awaiting the “unlikely event” of an electrical failure in flight. Other pilots enjoy using their handhelds regularly for checking ATIS before engine start and monitoring airport traffic just for fun. Simple, communication-only handhelds start at around $200. Basic features you can expect are an LCD frequency display, probably with a battery-life icon; a choice of using a knob or lighted keypad for selecting frequencies; single-button access for 121.5 (emergency) and weather frequencies, along with automatic severe weather alerts from NOAA; and storage space for regularly used frequencies. Moving up the ladder in comm-only used units, you will probably see larger, higher-resolution displays and more options for storage as you spend more money.…

If you’ve never been to Africa, you may be surprised, as I was, to learn that the continent is actually a huge horizontal band of semi-impenetrable jungle enclosed on top and bottom by twin strips of the world’s most forbidding deserts. I should have known, but I guess I never realized the scope of the Sahara on top and the Kalahari/Namib on the bottom. It was 1984, and a quartet of mostly dissimilar airplanes was being ferried from the U.S. to South Africa, mine to Johannesburg, one to Durban and two to Cape Town. It had been a long trip in relatively good weather, and we were happy to have made it to Libreville, Gabon, with no mechanical glitches. I was flying the largest airplane of the four, a Cessna…

MYSTERY Is it possible that Helen Keller—unable to hear or see—could have really flown an airplane across the Mediterranean Sea in 1946? BACKGROUND “Like a great graceful bird sailing through the illimitable skies.” —Helen Keller’s description of an airplane Born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880, Helen Keller was a mere 19 months old when she came down with a febrile illness that tragically robbed her of both sight and hearing. Deaf, blind and mute, she spent her youngest years struggling to wade through the dark, dense fog that had settled over her life. Her family described her as wild and unruly—understandably so—but also quite intelligent. Remarkably, young Helen Keller invented more than 60 hand signs for communication and learned to identify people by the vibration of their footsteps. On a…

Beech A36 Bonanza Chebanse, Illinois/Injuries: 1 Fatal, 1 Serious, 1 Minor The pilot reported that, during a cross-country flight, while in cruise altitude at 3,000 ft mean sea level, the engine lost power. He subsequently performed a forced landing to a muddy wheat field. Examination at the site revealed that the left and right main fuel tanks were intact; the left tank was empty and the right tank contained about 25 gallons. The wing tip tanks were breached during the accident, but burns in the field were indicative of fuel being in the wing tip tanks at the time they were breached. The fuel selector was found in the left tank position. Further examination revealed that the fuel line from the fuel selector to the engine-driven fuel pump contained no…

As we selected the aircraft we’d choose to feature here, we were greeted with a seemingly endless chain of questions, one often leading quite unexpectedly to the next. What planes were worthy of being a part of this conversation? What features did they need to possess? Was retractable gear a necessity? Was its lack disqualifying? Could we even create a single test of what constitutes a high-performance single, as the FAA has unsuccessfully attempted to do for more than six decades now by yoking the concept to horsepower? That rubric is to equate performance with power, a test that the FAA has saddled itself and us with ever since. And the more we thought about it, the more problematic the idea became. After all, pure cubic centimeters don’t equal speed,…

In March 2008, two minutes after takeoff from the Wiley Post Airport in Oklahoma (KPWA), a Cessna Citation 500 business jet suddenly entered a steep descent and crashed. There was no warning of what was to come. The weather was good, the afternoon takeoff uneventful. At 3,000 feet, the crew checked in with Oklahoma City departure, and the controller issued a climb-and-turn instruction, but it went unanswered. About 30 seconds later, on the Wiley Post tower frequency, someone said, “I just saw an airplane crash and explode.” Both pilots and all three passengers were killed and the airplane destroyed by impact forces and postcrash fire. How the flight came together was complicated and controversial. One week before the flight, United Engines called Interstate Helicopters, a Part 135 charter operation, to…

As the last lights of Texas slid beneath the wings and Arkansas loomed ahead, I eased the power off and let the Mooney begin a gradual descent toward my next stop. With apologies and a little artistic license applied to a popular presidential quote from the 1990s, I believed in a fuel stop in a place called Hope, Arkansas, the birthplace of former President Bill Clinton. The airport was marked as unattended, with 24-hour self-serve fuel available. I figured it’d make a good quick stop to fuel, hit the restroom, stretch and make the last three-hour flight of a long cross-country flight. My friend Grayson had bought a 1967 Mooney M20F, and I sort of share the blame in that decision. He’s a pilot at my airline and had longed…

The 1930s truly were the Golden Age of aviation design. The increased demand for air travel, improved engines and aircraft systems, and the influence of art deco streamline design combined to produce some of the most beautiful and functional aircraft of all time, like the Boeing 247, Northrop Alpha and Lockheed Electra. However, the development of the iconic Douglas DC-3 is an amazing story all on its own. Back in 1929, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT) inaugurated the first coast-to-coast air service by combining both rail and air travel. Passengers boarded the train in New York’s Grand Central Station, traveled on to Ohio and then boarded a Ford Trimotor for the daytime flight to Oklahoma. At nightfall, they were back on the train, in sleeper service, to Clovis, New Mexico, where…