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February 02, 2012
What Will the Jury Think? 2
Stephen Pope
image-Jury Box small 0
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Manslaughter charges brought against a New Hampshire private pilot who held only a single-engine land pilot certificate when he crashed his Cessna 310 twin on New Years Day 2011 should serve as a warning to all pilots. The message is this: If you do something dumb in an airplane, not only can people be hurt or killed, but you could also end up going to prison.

January 30, 2012
Tort Reform and Profit Margins 8
Robert Goyer
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(Photo courtesy of Cessna)

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In my recent article on Cessna's seminal single, the 172 Skyhawk, I mentioned that the company had discontinued its piston sales in the 1980s in the midst of a soft market. A few readers emailed to ask (very nicely) if I'd forgotten the product liability link to Cessna's cessation of piston production. I hadn't.

January 24, 2012
A Hundred Years of Cross Country Flight
image-VinFiz Enews

The Vin Fiz

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When truly personal aviation came about after the end of World War I, less than a hundred years ago, the nation was opened up to its citizens in a way it had never before been. Arguably the beginning of this tradition is the first transcontinental crossing of the United States in an airplane, the flight of the Vin Fiz by Cal Rodgers a hundred years ago. Rodgers was a beginning pilot who was deaf and chain smoked cigars, even while flying in his open cockpit Wright biplane.

January 24, 2012
Getting Spoiled in an AStar
Pia Bergqvist
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Once again, a new flying bug has bit me. This time the bite came from a bug-like aircraft – a helicopter. I had a chance to fly a Eurocopter AS350B3, also known as an AStar, the same type of helicopter that landed on top of Mt. Everest a few years ago and set an unbeatable record for the highest altitude landing and takeoff.

January 19, 2012
Trust but Verify 1
Robert Goyer
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The details of the near disaster are chilling. A Cessna 172 and an Embraer Regional Jet at Biloxi-Gulfport International Airport in Mississippi were cleared to take off on runways with intersecting departure paths only moments apart. On departure they missed each other, thank goodness, but only by a couple of hundred feet horizontally and by “0” feet vertically. It was pure luck that there are no fatalities instead of 55, the number of occupants of both airplanes.

January 16, 2012
White House Ratchets Up Heat on User Fees 22
Stephen Pope
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Remember that online petition asking the White House to abandon its $100 per flight user fee proposal? More than 9,000 of you signed it, prompting the government to consider the issue and write a response.

January 10, 2012
Shrinking Margins 7
Robert Goyer
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I just got back from a roundtrip flight to Central Florida for a speaking engagement, and even after all these years of flying 1,000-nm trips in light airplanes, I was still surprised by how starkly different the “out” and the “back” legs were.
 
This is one important lesson about transportation flying that no one ever taught me, either, and it should be a standard part of the New Private Pilot 101 curriculum. Plan for your return trip as though it’s an entirely different experience, because it very likely will be.
 

January 10, 2012
The Airplane that Ended a War 14
Stephen Pope
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The crew of Bockscar, which dropped the atomic
bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. Maj. Charles
Sweeny is standing in the dark jacket. SSgt. Raymond
Gallagher is in the front row, second from the right.
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Enola Gay. FIFI. The Great Artiste. Kee Bird. The Big Stink.

It was an airplane dubbed “Superfortress.” Yet many of the most famous Boeing B-29 bombers that plied the skies during the latter days of World War II carried strangely meek-sounding individual names. Perhaps that’s of benefit to our collective psyche since the airplanes in question were capable of raining such unfathomable destruction from above. After all, attaching a name to a killing machine is merely an attempt to humanize the brutality of war, isn't it?

January 03, 2012
Are You Awake?
Pia Bergqvist
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The recently implemented FAA rules on pilot fatigue for airline pilots made me ponder the importance of being alert when flying. If you’re not on your game it’s easy to nod off, particularly if you’re flying with an autopilot, and the consequences can be devastating. It’s worth taking an extra step in the prefight process to consider your level of alertness as a step to decrease risk.

January 03, 2012
Sensor Sensitivity 18
by Robert Goyer
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Illustration courtesy of U.S. Department of Defense
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I was intrigued by the capture of a U.S. drone aircraft by Iranian forces last month, who claim to have done it by spoofing the GPS signal that guided the drone, fooling into thinking it was landing back in Afghanistan when it was actually touching down in Iran.

I have to admit that what intrigues me is not the admittedly important military and political ramifications of the incident but the practical ramifications of it to United States National Airspace System (NAS) plans.

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