Search Results for: para port door

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: […]

||| |—|—| | | | 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 […]

If, as hoary nautical tradition holds, it’s bad luck to rename a ship, then the poor old SS Sea Breeze was damned and damned again. The midsize (606 feet) cruise ship began life in 1958 as the Federico C, designed for service out of Genoa for immigrants heading to new lives in Buenos Aires and […]

||| |—|—| | | | I’m not in my airplane. I’m sitting in my office. The sun is shining and there’s a gentle breeze caressing the leaves outside my window. Now. It didn’t start out to be a good day. The plan was to fly Judith to Ithaca, New York, to spend a weekend with […]

The natural evolution of airplanes is to increase the power, and that is just what Cirrus Design has done with its new SR22. Where the original production Cirrus, the SR20, flies with a 200-horsepower IO-360 six-cylinder Continental, the SR22 has an IO-550 Continental six that develops 310 horsepower. That is a big increase. Even though […]

||| |—|—| | | | At first glance, I don’t even recognize him. Nine years ago, Hank Potter was a vibrant, jolly soul, full of laughter, fire and stories of being Jimmy Doolittle’s navigator on the famous B-25 raid of Tokyo in 1942. Today, he and the 11 other “Doolittle Raiders” who were able to […]

||| |—|—| | | | According to the Pilot Communications Company, the PA 17-79 DNC XL is a pretty special unit. It offers 18-22 dB DNC and a maximum ambient noise level of 120 dB SPL at 100 Hz, in a bi-directional polar pattern, in addition to an EVI circuit with a 2-4 dB gain […]

Craftsmen in Kansas riveted together my old Cessna 120 many years before I was born. On quiet evening flights I would sometimes think about that, imagining the men who had built her and the pilots who had flown her before my mom even knew my dad’s name. Sometimes I almost thought that if I listened […]