Search Results for: Lockheed

In honor of Aviation Day, August 19, celebrating Orville Wright’s birthday, we bring you a piece that explores the stories around the first powered, controlled flight–and inspires us all to go to Dayton where the brothers lived. Blame it on “alternative facts.” Or maybe it was “fake news” — the 1930s version, anyway. It turns […]

It happens to be my lot in life as a pilot to get to fly regularly a couple of routes that take me through the most active thunderstorm areas in the country. These routes, from central Texas to northern Kansas and, again, from central Texas to Florida, not only point me in the direction of […]

In the early hours of August 19, 2019, a tropical wave appeared off the west coast of Africa. A few days later, it began showing signs of organization and cyclonic movement inside a small low-pressure area. By August 24, the system had grown large enough to qualify as an official tropical depression centered about 700 […]

For the most part, flying a multi-engine airplane is just like flying a single. Until an engine fails. When transitioning from a single to a conventional twin, pilots spend most of their training learning to handle engine failures and to eke out what little performance remains. In conventional twins we’re likely to fly, that means […]

Full-regime automatic flight control systems (AFCS) consist of at least a flight director (FD) and an autopilot (AP). “Full regime” means the AFCS has enough modes to control the aircraft from after takeoff to short final. It also means the AP controls the trim to operate over the full airspeed and centerof- gravity envelope. Selecting […]

Prior to the advent of jet transports like the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 in the late 1950s, what we’ve come to know as wake turbulence was often dismissed as “propwash.” As heavier and heavier aircraft, like the Lockheed C-5 and the Boeing 747, grew in numbers, the FAA, NASA, the U.S. Air Force and […]

Harbour Air flew a De Havilland Beaver on floats on pure electric power for the first time in early December as the first step in its program to fully electrify its fleet of historic seaplanes. The Vancouver-based airline serves dozens of communities off British Columbia’s west coast and most of its flights are 30 minutes or less so the company believes new advances in battery technology will enable it to safely carry out the dozens of commercial passenger flights it operates every day. The December flight was a demonstration of the motor in a plane near its gross weight with batteries and lasted about 15 minutes. CEO Greg McDougall lifted the almost-70-year-old airframe off the Fraser River and later reported that it flew like a Beaver. He said newer, lighter batteries that are becoming available will allow room for passengers and cargo and the savings on maintenance and downtime will ultimately pay off.

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing a method to produce aerospace-grade composites without the enormous ovens and pressure vessels currently used in the process. The technique may help to speed up the manufacturing of airplanes and other large, high-performance composite structures, such as blades for wind turbines. The researchers detail their […]

Somewhere among all your stuff, there’s undoubtedly a stash of old logbooks. Mine are on a bookcase in the den—except the most recent of six, which is sitting open on the dining-room table, patiently waiting to be updated. It’s been several years since that’s happened, but I keep stickers for flight reviews and jot down […]

NASA’s first large scale, piloted X-plane in more than three decades is cleared for final assembly and integration of its systems following a major project review by senior managers held December 12, 2019 at NASA’s headquarters in Washington. The management review, known as Key Decision Point-D (KDP-D), was the last programmatic hurdle for the X-59 […]