Search Results for: oxygen

Learjet. It sounds fast and it is. This airplane has had a place in our aviation consciousness for a long time as the ultimate in speed, wealth, luxury and convenience. When first introduced by Bill Lear in 1964 it became synonymous with these things and more. Lear had bought the tooling for a Swiss ground-attack […]

In last month’s Aftermath, which concerned fatal accidents that the NTSB had linked to hypoxia, I was puzzled by a few that involved experienced pilots who had been flying, in one case for a rather short time, in the 12,000- to 18,000-foot altitude range without supplemental oxygen. If scrambled fighters find a maskless pilot slumped […]

A homemade rocket reaches new heights.

A rocket carrying a dummy achieved a successful launch last month from a platform in the Baltic Sea. The craft, created by Danish group Copenhagen Suborbital over the course of the last few years, was aiming for an altitude of around 50,000 feet for the launch; it is not yet clear what altitude the HEAT […]

Almost any airplane more than a handful of years out of the factory has been modified to some extent. These pages have, on several occasions, discussed the difference between minor modifications requiring only a logbook entry, major mods accomplished as a field approval with an FAA Form 337 and more complicated additions necessitating a supplemental type certificate (STC). For my own airplane, which has been in service coming up on 50 years, I keep a three-ring binder documenting and preserving the Forms 337 and STC paperwork. The binder isnt full, but it wont take much before Ill need to find another place to keep all those important forms.

Februarys article, “Horizontal Lift,” is correct in stating the horizontal component of the lift vector turns the airplane. But as a long-time flight instructor and physics teacher I would prefer to explain the airplane turns because there is a net inward force acting on it. This is an unbalanced force, acting toward the center of the circle about which the plane is turning. And yes, the plane is accelerating even though the pilot may be maintaining a constant airspeed, his direction is changing and therefore the plane is accelerating.

The world will not only be a better place, it will also seem much smaller if EADS can pull off its latest concept airplane called ZEHST (Zero Emission High Supersonic Transport), revealed at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget, France. Plans are to produce an airplane that impacts the environment minimally, while having the […]

__A search for the word hypoxia in NTSB accident reports for the past decade turns up just 15 occurrences. Of these, five do not involve our usual understanding of hypoxia as incapacitation due to protracted exposure to high altitude without supplemental oxygen; the references are, instead, to carbon monoxide poisoning from a leaky muffler, elderly […]

Climbing into a Cirrus SR22 equipped with Avidyne’s Entegra Release 9 avionics system after spending three hours flying in the left seat of a Diamond DA40 fitted with Garmin’s G1000 cockpit felt like stepping onto the surface of another planet. Arrayed before me in the Cirrus were two large flat-panel displays presenting all the usual […]

Although my airplane doesnt have a turbocharger, I regularly cruise at altitudes where supplemental oxygen is either required or strongly advised. My personal rule is to use it when above 10,000 feet msl for longer than an hour, or anytime at or above 12,500 feet. Thats during the day; at night, I use it when cruising above 8000 feet. But for the solo flight in question, I planned to be at or below my oxygen altitudes. Although I had a full bottle aboard the airplane, it was buried in the baggage area, under all the gear I needed for my two-week business trip.