Search Results for: Lockheed

Easter Sunday had begun as just another holiday to spend relaxing. Connecticut was finally beginning to show consistent signs that spring would actually occur. With the encouragement of more pleasant weather, Kari Sorenson started the Model A. He and his girlfriend, Ashley, climbed into the antique car and went for a drive. Neither one of […]

Even though I fly a Technologically Challenged Airplane, I do have a Garmin 396 with datalinked XM Weather. My trip to Oshkosh last Friday would not have worked without it. I filed IFR from home base, Somerset Airport in New Jersey, to my fuel stop at Sandusky, Ohio. With the headwinds forecast by fltplan.com, I […]

After I wrote (Technicalities, April) that BR in the metars stands for brume, which is French for mist or fog, a reader, Bob Bartch, with whom I was exchanging e-mails on another topic, commented that he had learned that word from a lyric by an American-French singer, Joe Dassin, who covered Gordon Lightfoot’s profoundly morose […]

It’s funny, the things that stick. Every day, people make comments to me. Whole conversations ensue. Years and years of words, sentences, stories and dissertations pile up in the mental “in” box. Yet out of all those words, only a few lines, jokes, pieces of advice or phrases actually imprint clearly enough on the internal […]

Viking Air, the British Columbia company that successfully reintroduced the Twin Otter last year, has made a pitch to the Canadian government to consider something old in its quest for a new search and rescue platform: the Buffalo, a heavy-duty midsized utility transport hauler. Last produced in the ’70s by de Havilland, the Buffalo is […]

A Monday report in the Wichita Eagle cites “rumors” that Cessna’s parent company Textron could be for sale. The news drove Textron stock up-though it still rests far closer to the bottom of its fluctuation curve than the top. According to some observers in the finance sector, Lockheed Martin could be among the potential buyers-though […]

There is frost accumulating inside the windows of my cockpit. I reach a gloved hand up and scrape a clear opening in the ice. The long, graceful lines of the left wing extend almost 50 feet into the impossibly thin air surrounding us. Normally when I fly, I’m off the surface of the planet, but […]

No one at the Lockheed Skunk Works would ever have envisioned the U-2 still being the cutting-edge platform for Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions more than half a century after its first flight. But over the years, the Air Force has invested close to $2 billion on enhancements to both the airplane […]

Some might suspect sour grapes, but at an economic summit earlier this week, Senator John McCain questioned whether his rival in last November’s presidential election really needs $11.2 billion worth of new helicopters. In 2005, then-President Bush pressed for upgraded rotorcraft for the presidential mission. In light of the September 11 attacks, John Young, assistant […]

The building that houses the Oakland Flight Service Station is nothing remarkable — just a square concrete structure at the northern end of Oakland Airport’s North Field. But it’s surrounded by history. Old, clapboard buildings from World War II line the airport frontage road that leads to the station. And side streets still carry names […]