Search Results for: wright

Zoe Dell Lantis grabbed the opportunity to work as an exhibition girl at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939—which celebrated the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge just six months prior. Lantis was a 20-year-old dancer looking to expand her horizons, and she did just that, joining an aerial promotional tour […]

After a weekend with friends at Kentucky’s Lake Cumberland, my niece and her husband were packing up for the drive home. Somebody tossing garbage bags into a dumpster spied a bundle of discarded Playboy magazines in pristine condition all from the 1980s. “Any of you guys interested in old Playboy magazines?” My psychologist nephew-in-law, Jim, […]

A popular misconception is that the Wright brothers, in addition to all of their other achievements, invented the airfoil. They didn’t. Sir John Cayley, an English engineer who also first identified the four forces of flight—lift, drag, thrust and weight—developed the cambered airfoil through detailed experimentation. His three-part work, On Aerial Navigation, published in 1809 and […]

I’d like to add one more suggestion to Thomas Turner’s article on “Handling In-Close Approach Changes” (January 2020). Using ForeFlight on a tablet, I have found the pilot can switch from one approach plate to another in literally a couple of seconds rather than the several minutes it takes to thumb through a booklet looking […]

Bipartisan legislation, supported by the aviation industry, has been put forth to establish a national aviation center, for the purpose of workforce development and overall promotion of the industry—and make sure that high schools around the country have access to aviation-based STEM curriculums. Senators James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) introduced the legislation, […]

No matter how successful we are in life, there’s always someone with a bigger house, a newer car and a better job to help keep us honest. That’s certainly true in aviation, where we’re often left to wonder how some pilots can get away with buying and flying more airplane than they can handle. You […]

Rereading Robert Wright’s article in the July 2019 issue (“North To Alaska”), in which he was following the British Columbia and Alaska coast, he writes that the latter part of the trip was “mostly on top” from Skagway to Cordova. For someone who is frequently advocating risk management, it is hard to understand his reasoning […]

For the pilots, crews and families that operate vintage biplanes for giving public rides, there are few—if any—days off when it comes to performing important annual maintenance and 100-hour inspections. Meeting the FAA safety criteria for holding out rides to the public when your airplane was built over 80 years ago requires a dedication to […]

The Pacific Northwest, for the purposes of this article, includes the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming. Thats a huge hunk of territory and comprises more than 250,000 square miles for Washington, Oregon and Idaho alone. The region includes two major mountain ranges-the Cascades and the Northern Rockies-and many smaller ones, as well as several major river basins. There are major cities in the region, such as Seattle, Portland and Boise, but also thousands of square miles of largely empty land and wilderness.

Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum (WOTR) and the Jeppesen Aviation Foundation announced on December 17, “Wright Brothers Day,” that they have joined forces to create the Wings Over the Rockies Captain Jeppesen Foundation, a new 501(c)(3) organization. The foundation’s mission is to support Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum in […]