Search Results for: wright

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.

The original Cincinnati Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant, which opened in the 1930s, even today sports a somewhat modified but still charming version of the original retro airplane on its large outdoor sign. This popular hamburger joint (and much more) is on a busy street, about 2 miles north and slightly right of Lunken Airport’s southwest […]

It fascinates me that many GA pilots of single-engine airplanes cruise at such low altitudes. Theyre apparently oblivious to the fact that they are flying behind a single engine and if it fails you are on short final to somewhere! Extra altitude not only increases your radius of action, it also adds extra time for trouble shooting (which might eliminate the initial problem altogether) and increases the probability that a Mayday call might be heard. The side benefits include greater aircraft efficiency, cooler temperatures in the summer and possibly a smoother ride, in addition to less-congested airspace. Those long, low, flat, power-on final approaches can put you in the trees if your engine even coughs on short final. Keep a little energy in the bank and make it SOP to shoot for a reasonable aiming point on the runway.

Yep, its time to make fun of those who in 2015 ignored sound judgment and lived to garner pilot lounge derision. And, since pilots tend to repeat the same mistakes in hopes of different results, we heed George Orwell who said, We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. Since no intelligent man or woman stepped forward, its up to me.

Ive owned Cessna T210s since 1977; first a 1969 J model and then a 1979 N model with a TSIO-520-R engine. In the 1980s, there were a number of fuel exhaustion accidents in 210s, all of them attributable to not getting a full fill and resulting in being shorted an hours supply when fueling stops after fuel backs up out of the filler port. The outboard sections of the fuel tanks are slightly higher than the bottom of the filler port. To get the last one-plus gallons in the tanks requires the slowest of fueling until reaching the real full point.