Search Results for: wright

Every afternoon my partner Nancy and I walk around Echo Park Lake. Two miles from ­downtown Los Angeles, it is not Walden Pond. It is man-made, cement lined, ­shallow and ringed by a paved walk on which multicolored streams of ­people, old and young, some ­strolling, some rolling, flow in at least two directions, maybe more. On […]

Only one of her kind remains: The Douglas DC-7B was a workhorse for several airlines during its tenure in the 1950s and 60s, but none still fly save for N4887C. The airplane has had maintenance completed this summer at the Coolidge Municipal Airport in Arizona in advance of a ferry flight to its new owner—announced […]

Step two: Set the clock that held no resemblance to the actual time of day. I fiddled with it for a few minutes and gave up after finding myself seemingly 50 layers deep in menus. I assigned the task to my wife, also an engineer and a pilot. She even got out the manual-a separate one for the man-machine interface but after a frustratingly long time, she was also defeated.

Pilots fly for a variety of reasons. If youre like me, transportation is the main reason to own an airplane. Flying a single-engine general aviation airplane can be an effective way to travel for business and personal reasons, especially in this era of degrading, inflexible and unpredictable airline service. However, to safely use small aircraft for this purpose and manage the risks, you need to expand the scope of your typical planning efforts and be ready to change schedules and even cancel some portions of a trip. This is especially true if, like me, your travel requirements include the entire United States.

The second episode of a new PBS series, “Breakthrough: The Ideas That Changed the World,” premieres tomorrow night April 24 with “Airplane,” a look at the people who inspired the Wright Brothers to create the first practical aircraft. The journey to the first successful flight is a story full of passion, danger and death, and […]

Nearly everyone who attends an airshow or has visited an aviation museum has probably envisioned themselves waving to people on the side of the taxiway from the cockpit of one of the airplanes they’ve seen. Some lean toward the North American B-25 “Mitchell” bomber, made famous by General Jimmy Doolittle and his band of 16 […]

Stallion 51, a flight training facility in Kissimmee, Florida that specializes in warbird training, celebrated a very special milestone yesterday for its founder and chief pilot Lee Lauderback at Sun ‘n Fun in Lakeland, Florida. The stellar pilot reached the 10,000-hour mark in the P-51 Mustang, having flown a total of more than 22,000 hours […]

My grandparents were Eastern European Jews, and I am the grandchild of immigrants. They came here with nothing. The civilization from which they came was destroyed by the Nazis, so, growing up in the 1950s, there were virtually no physical artifacts of my family’s long European existence. Most of the houses of my contemporaries (all […]

The aviation industry in recent years has highlighted loss of control in-flight (LOC-I) as the leading cause of general aviation fatal accidents. Many aviation organizations, including government agencies, have devoted considerable time and resources to target this problem and develop effective mitigations to reduce the number of LOC-I accidents. Much of that effort focuses on a pilot losing control, and how to train and equip to prevent it, because its the final event in the accident chain.

You are an instrument-rated private pilot. Your friend is working on the rating and you have acted as her safety pilot while she practices under the hood. Shes doing great. Today ceilings are high but below final approach fix altitudes. You feel comfortable filing IFR as pilot in command while she flies, so you file and off you go in the clubs 172. No hood for your friend today. She does all the flying. Two approaches, with 12 minutes in actual instrument conditions. She did well.