Search Results for: flying w airport

I made a list of the people I had to call. There were 10 people on the list ranging from Bonnie, who was scheduled to house-sit for our Aussie shepherds, Rueben and Whoopi, to my mother, who watches the weather and knows-even before I do-where bad things are happening. One of the names on the […]

The late Ed Heinemann was a designer at Douglas Aircraft. He was responsible for the A-4 Skyhawk, a single-seater with an empty weight of less than 10,000 pounds that served for a long time as the smallest carrier-based attack aircraft in the Navy’s arsenal. It embodied the now-famous design philosophy emblazoned on Heinemann’s office wall: […]

What is it with pilots and fuel? The most obvious requirement for continued powered flight-fuel in the tanks-seems to confound pilots more than P-factor. It’s impossible to know for sure how many pilots run out of fuel each year, because many power-loss events do not result in an accident if there is no serious personal […]

||| |—|—| | | | The title of this column is “Gear Up” because I like the symbolism of takeoff and flight. It means to me the moment just after positive rate has been established when, with a short upward pull by the pilot, the airplane is reconfigured, while accelerating, to assume the shape it […]

I don’t know if there are 10,000 lakes in Central Florida to match Minnesota’s famous license-plate claim, but I wouldn’t be surprised. As I flew over the region in the Saratoga on my way down to Sun ‘n Fun, I looked down at a landscape freckled with lakes, lakes big and small, blue and green, […]

||| |—|—| | | | A man approached me in the Flying tent at the EAA’s AirVenture airshow last summer and thanked me for, as he put it, “working a miracle in my life.” He explained that his wife, who in 20 years of marriage had never been willing to go flying with him, had […]

The wind was blowing out of the south, 23 knots gusting to 27, when the 172 touched down on Runway 14. The crosswind was about 40 degrees. A pilot on the ground, using a handheld radio, was at the approach end of the runway giving wind advisories to a group of airplanes returning from a […]

||| |—|—| | | | Think driving is cheap? Think again. Runzheimer International, a management consulting firm, added up the costs for several trips of around 500 miles and found that driving, which obviously doesn’t save any time on a trip of that length, doesn’t save money either. Once all the costs were figured (fuel, […]

||| |—|—| | | | Pilots and controllers are doing a pretty good job of keeping airplanes apart on the runway. During the four-year period from 1997 to 2000 there were 266 million takeoff and landing operations at the country’s 459 tower-controlled airports, and only 1,369 of those operations involved a runway incursion. That means […]

||| |—|—| | | | Consider the following scenarios: …You are on final approach to a major airport when your airplane unexpectedly hits wake turbulence, which turns it upside down. …As you initiate your takeoff roll, the gust front from an approaching storm blows you into the air at a low airspeed and high angle […]