Search Results for: Lockheed

A couple of books I’ve been dipping into lately strike me as epitomizing some changes that have occurred in the past 50 or 60 years. One of them, Wolfgang Langewiesche’s classic Stick and Rudder, found its way to me through an old friend who, being well into his 80s, sold his airplane and with great […]

At my day job, it’s easy to take for granted that most aspects of flight planning are generated by typing the appropriate codes into the computer. The data have already been entered by the dispatcher and the load planner. For the most part, my job is to simply review the information. When I made the […]

July 2010 — The Mooney 201 was a product of an earlier fuel crisis, the one that plagued the United States for most of the 1970s. When adjusted for inflation, avgas cost matched today’s $5 per gallon and up, and many pilots prized fuel efficiency matched with speed above all other airplane characteristics. Mooneys had […]

_June 2010 _ THE THREE ROOMS THAT constitute the offices of the Aereon Corp. are tucked away on the second floor of a brick building near the Princeton University campus. The narrow hallway is lined with gray doors, many of which have hand-lettered business signs on them. You have to know the Aereon offices are […]

On a cool, pastel-gray morning that was typical for the city of Syracuse, New York, a wide-eyed 6-year-old boy clambered up the stairs that led to the entry door of a Lockheed Electra. With Mom at his side, the boy was given a tour of the cockpit by the crew. At the completion of the […]

Certain universal questions pop up over and over, like “Why is there something, when there could be nothing?” or “Can a jet fly faster than its own exhaust velocity?” Let’s look at the second one; I’ll get back to the first in a future column. Reciprocating engines inhale about 15 pounds of air for every […]

In 1991, Bobby Bishop and his father were operating a skydiving operation out of Celina, Texas. They had a Cessna 182, a Pilatus PC-6 Porter, a DC-3 and a de Havilland Caribou. But they wanted something in between the Porter and the DC-3/Caribou size aircraft. A de Havilland Twin Otter didn’t seem cost-effective, and the […]

The wag who said he was “sure there was money in aviation because he put it there” might have been Ebby Lunken, who saw a sizable chunk of cash disappear into his beloved Midwest Airways. It was a grand idea and would have succeeded if the income from ticket sales had even approached the outgo […]

The Greeks would have had a name for it, I imagine. Not quite a full tragedy, because there were moments of greatness. But it’s a complex memory that I still can’t easily categorize. So when my friend Pat called and asked what should have been a couple of simple questions, I had no easy or […]

For no apparent reason, Martha fell in love with airplanes at age nine and she learned to fly an Ercoupe in the early 1960s while attending college in her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. Armed with a degree in English Literature, she became a flight instructor and operated a flying school at Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport for […]