Search Results for: wright

In summer 1954, I was 10 going on 11; the “going on” part is important when you’re 10. My father was in New York for some reason or another, and my mother and I were to join him there for a month. It was the first great travel adventure of my life. Born and living […]

In 1928, Charles Lindbergh personally selected Port Columbus Airport in Columbus, Ohio, as the eastern terminus of Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT), one of America’s first commercial airlines and the first to offer coast-to-coast service. In July 1929, a beautiful art deco and modern (for the era) terminal was opened to the public at what is today known […]

Perhaps you know of the FAA’s Wright Brothers Master Pilot award recognizing 50 years of safe flying. I looked into it but the documentation requirement put me off. But, my wife fulfilled the documentation requirement as a gift to me for a recent milestone birthday. We were visiting my 97-year-old mother with extended family and […]

Following up on Robert Wright’s excellent article in September’s issue (“Are The ACS Working?”), yes, I agree that they are working except for one thing, something that I found out about by accident. But first, some background. During the summer, the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) offers National Flight Academies for CAP Cadets where they go […]

Throughout its history, aviation has generated some of the most remarkable figures that ever lived, including those brave pilots who made the first forays into the air and who courageously pushed the bounds of flight in ways previously unimaginable. At the same time, aviation has produced a number of people whose heroism rises above the […]

The first Airman Certification Standards (ACS) were issued in 2016, after a five-year gestation period, replacing the Practical Test Standards (PTS) system that previously governed checkrides for airman certificates and ratings. Implementation has proceeded smoothly, and according to designated pilot examiners (DPEs), the ACS is not more burdensome than the PTS. The big unknown, however, […]

Thank you for an informative and (in my opinion) long overdue article on VMC and its associated hazards in light twin-engine aircraft (“Is VMC Fixed Or Variable?” August 2020). The closest I have come to my demise in my 47 years of flying occurred many years ago in a light twin (Beech Baron). As a […]

Compare 1969, and the launch of Apollo 11 to 2020, and the successful docking of the crewed Dragon Endeavor with the International Space Station. Both milestones in the push that the United States made into space happened against similar backdrops of racial protest. The Smithsonian Institution has called upon its various member museums to delve […]

Environmental risks, one of the four broad hazard categories the FAA identifies in its PAVE acronym (see the sidebar at the bottom of the opposite page), typically involve weather and terrain, but also can include traffic, navaids, obstacles and even wake turbulence. When several such hazards are present at the same time, they can easily […]

Though firmly rooted in aviation’s earliest days—it was founded in 1866—the Royal Aeronautical Society advances firmly into the future on a number of fronts. One of the most recent of these missions has been the opening of the society’s new National Aerospace Library Film Archive. Though the library itself—housed near the Farnborough airport in the […]