Search Results for: DC-3

It was past 10 o’clock, and we were beat after eight hours grinding around Illinois and Wisconsin on check rides for a new Part 135 air-taxi company. Goldie and I were sitting in the dark, deserted terminal building at Rockford Airport while Don went back out on the ramp to see if the mechanic was […]

I should probably stick to telling flying stories, but ­occasionally I get so worked up that I can’t resist taking off on what I see as some new wacko FAA-mandated requirement or procedure. So it’s no surprise that the agency’s current ­“initiative” (in Bureaucratese) of replacing the Practical Test Standards with the Airman Certification Standards […]

Airplanes, pilots and airports: Where you find two, you’ll find the third. In my airplane-obsessed childhood, this indisputable fact led to an early acquaintance with every airfield within a 20-mile radius. These were quiet country fields, mind you, but every so often a Cessna would drop in to do a couple of touch-and-goes, or maybe […]

I borrowed this title from a documentary about Pete Seeger and the Weavers because the phrase “wasn’t that a time” always comes to mind when I ­remember an airfreight company operating out of southwestern Ohio for nearly 30 years — first as Hogan Air and then Miami Valley Aviation. When I came back home to […]

The Ocean Reef Vintage Weekend, which started in 1994, attracts dozens of vintage airplanes, cars and yachts. The collection continues to grow each year. For the first few years, only a handful of airplanes flew into the airstrip at the private Key Largo, Florida, community. For the most recent event, in early December, 2016, nearly […]

John Mugavin is made of rare stuff. This stocky, hugely talented, successful and gutsy guy is also as friendly and “old shoe” as they come. Mugavin is a familiar name around here for both the primo auto-body shop he owns and operates, and his fame as a dirt-track driver. Twenty-five years after building his first […]

There are airplanes out there, and I know it because they’re all stepping on each other over the radio. The CTAF is a cacophony of squeaks, squawks and indecipherable gibberish clearly announcing that everyone and their brother is flying today. And why not? It’s a gorgeous Saturday in coastal California. It would be nice to […]

I could smell the pine trees below as I turned base and the nose of the little taildragger I was piloting pointed toward a sheer rock wall. When I turned final, the runway was still invisible. It was at the end of a narrow gorge that followed down the mountainside. Tracking that line, I continued […]

We call it flying in a black hole — no stars or ground lighting to guide you. You are flying a TP-3, a heavy, lumbering beast of an airplane, and you are just 350 feet above the ground, accelerating toward 150 knots. The cockpit glows an eerie Halloween green. Your captain indicates it’s time, and […]

Both spherics and NEXRAD have blind spots and neither is infallible. Spherics devices can have false negatives because they dont see those static discharges until they happen. While most cells with dangerous opposing currents also produce significant static, nature is inherently unpredictable and the static discharges can lag. Of course, the delays in getting NEXRAD images to the cockpit can lead to significant errors. Plus, radar only seeing precipitation, not turbulence, can cause difficulty interpreting the image.