Search Results for: wright

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 […]

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 […]