Every once in a while life intrudes on this love affair I have with airplanes, and I feel like that bewildered soldier at Little Big Horn: “Mr. Custer, what are we doing here?” How often did I gaze out the window of some FAA office (when they were still on airports), angry, frustrated or scared […]
Eclipse Aviation employees were promised last Friday that their paychecks for the first two weeks of November would be delivered by last Tuesday. They were not disappointed, as company management was able to secure the financing needed to pay workers-at least for now. Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Eclipse would not comment on its financial state, but […]
Imagine an airplane — or house or car or spouse, for that matter — that you have loved for decades but over those years you have wished for some changes and improvements in key areas. The Hawker line of business jets has been admired by legions of pilots and passengers for more than 40 years, […]
Aeons ago, Flying had a regular column called Foreign Accent that reported on aeronautical doings abroad. I was writing it in 1976, and in the February issue I quoted a letter, originally published in the British magazine Flight, from one James Ferguson of Aberdeen, regarding the flight around England and Scotland of a World War […]
We all work hard to develop the skills necessary to pass a checkride. A lot of effort and expense is involved. But we often lose sight of the real objective-not just building those skills to pass a checkride, but to keep those skills sharp so that we might call upon them when theyre needed. One mechanism to help us do that efficiently is a proficiency checklist, one inspired by an Aviation Safety article enough years ago that its been lost in the easily accessed archives. Recently weve gotten some feedback from long-time readers that they liked the article and still use the ideas presented there. They suggested we revisit the idea and present it again. Given the extraordinary cost of fuel and flying today, its become ever more difficult to allocate the money to just go up and play or even to simply maintain proficiency. Increasingly, weve got to have a specified purpose to justify going flying. Before we delve into the proficiency checklist, though, lets take a look at the way a typical GA pilot maintains proficiency.
A few comments regarding reader feedback (“Unicom”) in your September issue: Jim Pipers explanation of O2 partial pressure changing “only slightly” with density altitude is a little misleading. The partial pressure of oxygen is exactly 21 percent of the density altitude air pressure. For example, the absolute air pressure at 10,000-feet density altitude is 21.145 in. Hg; the partial pressure of oxygen is 4.44 in., or 74 percent of PPO2 at sea level. A 26 percent decrease in available oxygen has my attention. Morris Holmes comments are more troubling. In another life, when I regularly flew in a MOA, we were not looking for LBFs (little bitty, etc.). We were working hard learning new combat maneuvers or practicing old ones, at high Gs and often at high Mach numbers. If you were to fly a PC-12 through a hot MOA like that every day at 12,000 to 18,000 feet, you would be dead within a year. You would have had the right to be there, but you would still be dead.
Twelve months ago, Embraer’s first “clean-sheet” business jet design — the Phenom 100 — had just completed its first test flights. What a difference 12 months can make! Today, the Phenom is just one of four … count them, four … “clean-sheet” Executive Jet designs in development at Embraer. Currently, the Phenom 100 is finishing […]
I regularly fly my airplane some 250 pounds overgross. But, I do it legally, since its equipped with an STCd tip tank installation. The STC (supplemental type certificate) allows operation at a maximum gross takeoff weight of 3550 pounds, an increase of around 7.5 percent from the airplanes original 3300-pound gross weight when it left the factory. But theres no paperwork accompanying the admittedly older STC providing performance charts at the higher gross weight. Theres no question performance suffers at the higher weight, but Im legally allowed to use the older, lighter weight in computing performance. To compensate, I make sure I use runways of adequate length when operating at the higher weight and higher-than-published airspeeds, accepting a lower climb rate. The tradeoff is worth it. Whether by placing too much aboard, or putting it in the wrong place, loading an airplane outside its weight and balance envelope is relatively easy to do with most GA aircraft. Its one thing to know youre slightly over the gross weight and have the runway to handle it. Its quite another to overload the airplane and then fail to consider the impact on performance.
A lot of pilots saw some impressive video of a German Airbus airline crew trying to land in a horrendous crosswind. Other than the wind, the weather was good. The crab angle on final was substantial and the turbulence enthusiastic. It turned into quite a tussle over the runway as the pilot tried to land. […]
I had no preconceived notions or expectations as I rolled into the parking lot at the northern end of Lake Washington. The Seattle sky was a typical mixture of grey confusion, the clouds in various meteorological forms. A small swath of orange glowed in the distant northwest, a feeble reminder that the earth still revolved […]
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