Search Results for: Lockheed

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It was late afternoon and time to fly home after a productive business meeting. Before heading to the airport, the pilot called Flight Service. Most of the significant weather was along a cold front just to the north of his east-west proposed route. The briefer mentioned some light snow showers were showing up on radar near the front. There were a few pilot reports of light to moderate icing, but all of them were associated with the weather to the north. The briefer alerted the pilot to an AIRMET for IFR conditions and mountain obscuration along a portion of his proposed route, but as of yet no en route advisories for structural icing had been issued.

We bought ice and Styrofoam chests at a Family Dollar store after leaving the Bourgeois Meat Market in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and packed them with crawfish boudin (sausage), headcheese and beef jerky. The boudin and headcheese (sounds gross but this stuff is a scrumptious pâté kind of thing) would be OK for a long time but […]

Fascination with creating the fastest airplanes has existed since the dawn of aviation. The first air races sprung up as early as 1909 and speed records quickly reached new highs, pushing aerodynamic engineers to reduce drag. As engine technology advanced, aircraft were designed around these new power plants, and over time the introduction of wind […]

Around 1950 the Air Force decided it needed a new trainer airplane. As you know, the Beech T-34 was the winner. My story comes from one of the airplanes that did not win. The Temco T-35 Buckaroo was a spinoff of the Globe Swift. Saudi Arabia ordered about 15 of the T-35As, armed, to be […]

The fire season is upon us and, with severe drought conditions in some parts of the country, it has the potential to be an ugly one. If you’re planning on flying in the late summer and early fall, before any regular precipitation starts to fall, you need to be aware of the fire potential and […]

For those of you who havent been following our little IFR soap opera with Lockheed Martin over Flight Service, heres the nutshell summary: We visited the under-construction Virginia hub of LMs Flight Service in 2006. It looked promising. We looked again in 2008 after the program fell on its face and was working to resurrect itself.

A few years ago, I managed to shoot an approach to minimums and not even know it. I was hauling cargo from Memphis to St. Louis Downtown. The forecasts at St. Louis werent all that bad, maybe 1000 overcast and three miles visibility. When I picked up ATIS, it had worsened to 400 and a mile. Eh, no sweat for a freight dog. I shot the ILS and landed uneventfully.

The tale used to go like this: Its a dark and stormy night. Youve spent the last 500 miles bouncing around the inside of an unbroken cloud, living in a world of round instruments 20 inches in front of your face. Youve kept the attitude indicator blue-side up, the altimeters 100s hand at 12 oclock, and the CDI needle within a degree or two of center as VOR after VOR has ticked by. On departure, the TAF for your destination was sickeningly close to minimums-but that information is hours old.

For an industry where speed is measured in hundreds of knots, changes in technology do not arrive quickly or easily to aviation.