Search Results for: DC-3

I’m haunted by the sky … by wind and clouds, by airplanes and fliers. It’s been a gift, a blessing: struggling to acquire and hone skills; taking written exams and practicing for check rides; feeling the pride of earning a certificate or rating and the gloom of a less-than-stellar performance; teaching neophytes how to land […]

The service was at a Presbyterian church in a small town east of Cincinnati — about a 30-minute flight in the Cessna 180. I had planned to fly there and commandeer the airport’s retired police car, but my airplane wouldn’t start. When I jumped in and “cranked,” it wouldn’t fire — odd, because it was […]

Its enlightening to contrast 1959 with today. The civilian jet era had barely begun, and the skies were still ruled by DC-7s, Connies and Stratocruisers, with Convairs and DC-3s for the short hops. Airline fares were tightly regulated and four-engine airliners stopped at a surprising number of out-of-the-way places. Yet a large majority of Americans had never flown in any kind of airplane.

In the 1960s, Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes committed to putting a 4,000-foot paved runway in every county — an idea promoted by his friend Norman Crabtree. Both men were from rural southeastern Ohio and proud Bobcats — graduates of Ohio University at Athens. Norm, director of the Ohio Aviation Division, flew the governor around in […]

One of the concerns many pilots express about doing their flight planning on a tablet computer is that they dont spend time with a chart and a plotter looking over a route. They end up starting a flight with less situational awareness about airports where they can bail out if something goes wrong en route. That, combined with what can become a rote fixation on selecting an IFR alternate based only on the regs regarding weather at the destination, is an invitation to poor decision-making when a little smoke in the cockpit means shutting off the electrical system a third of the way into the flight, or the engine starts running rough on initial climb from an airport thats below approach minimums.One way out of these dilemmas is to keep in mind the FARs are, by law, nothing more than minimum standards-and only looking at an alternate airport for the destination on an IFR flight of 500 miles might not be doing ourselves any favors. We always need an ace in the hole, and it doesnt have to be the one we tell the FAA about on the flight plan.

Significant advances in aviation technology usually arrive not with a brilliant flash of light and poof of smoke but over many years, in a slow, inexorable evolution of products that we sometimes don’t even recognize as signifying a momentous change until, suddenly, the next incredible new capability is in our midst. When we stop to […]

My first ride in a DC-3-way back in the cheap seats-could have been my last. It was the mid-1980s, and the old girl had been outfitted to demonstrate early moving-map technology. The tech was so early, in fact, that a DC-3 was needed to accommodate all the electronics that now fit into a smartphone. To make a long story short, a 30-minute demonstration ride became a lengthier weather- and fuel-related diversion. As the crew and passengers disembarked to stretch our legs before the last leg home, a fuel truck pulled up to add some much-appreciated dinosaur juice. It said Jet A on the side.

There have been millions of pilots and a few hundred really great ones, those whose achievements pushed the boundaries of flight. Names like Neil Armstrong, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Yeager, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Manfred von Richtofen, and Amelia Earhart are familiar to aviators and non-fliers alike. Others, like those featured here, are known to aviation […]

During World War II the British adopted the term boffin for scientists or engineers secretly developing novel weapons, inventing radar, breaking codes and so on. Frank Whittle, one of the creators of the jet engine, was a notable boffin. Another, less well-known than Whittle although, like him, later to be the subject of a motion […]

A few weeks ago I flew the Cessna 180 to a nearby grass strip to give a sport pilot practical in a man’s ­Pietenpol Air Camper. Coincidentally, somebody else had just sent me an old Antique Airplane Association magazine. The “Our Lady Antiquer” section in this January-February 1968 issue featured “brand new AAA Member 9010, […]