Search Results for: wright

Thankfully, most of my operations are fairly routine, and not too demanding of my average skills. The trick, of course, is keeping them sharp and knowing when to avoid a situation demanding more than I have to give. Thats one result of being trained by older instructors instead of time-building youngsters and accumulating a bit of experience over the years.

In the last decade, the general aviation fatal accident rate, which had been decreasing for some time, reached a plateau and has stubbornly resisted industry and FAA efforts to further reduce it. Hovering in the range of 1.20-1.38 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours, this safety record is widely considered a deterrent to general aviation growth and may be one of the reasons student starts have continued to decrease. As a community, we may have oversold the benefits of a new generation of technically advanced aircraft (TAA) to an emerging latent market of individuals who are not traditional enthusiasts and who wish to use these aircraft for safe transportation.

The world’s only flyable Boeing B-29 Superfortress is not quite airworthy — yet. It’s been four years since the Boeing last flew, and the efforts of the Commemorative Air Force (CAF) to return “FIFI” to the sky are close. But a “scheduling conflict” has led the FAA to delay issuing a new airworthiness certificate. FIFI […]

Its no great secret that nearly all new-production aircraft now have glass cockpits and advanced devices such as weather data link. Even technologies such as synthetic vision have become the new norm. In a way, the term technically advanced aircraft (TAA) has become a misnomer but it is still widely recognized as a tag line for a variety of related issues-including TAA training.

Please Plan on Attending” was the subject line in an e-mail from Marty Bevill at Wapakoneta airport (“Wapak” to the locals) about 100 miles north of Cincinnati. Officially AXV, it’s the Neil Armstrong Airport at New Knoxville in Auglaize County, nestled in mid-Ohio farm country south of Lima. The airport namesake grew up in Wapak […]

May 2010 ONE OF THE MORE persistent hoaxes drifting about on the Internet concerns an airplane called the Kalinin K-7. Built in the early 1930s, the K-7 was Russian, and big. Really big. Russian designers those days displayed a positive passion for sheer size; Igor Sikorsky’s Ilya Muromets, for example, which flew just 10 years […]

The way I see it, Angelina Jolie and I have a lot in common. We’re both women pilots who own our own airplanes. We’ve both flown with Air Serv International in Africa. We’ve both spent time with Darfur refugees. And, as of one recent Friday evening, I can say with all truthfulness that we’ve both […]

In 1991, Bobby Bishop and his father were operating a skydiving operation out of Celina, Texas. They had a Cessna 182, a Pilatus PC-6 Porter, a DC-3 and a de Havilland Caribou. But they wanted something in between the Porter and the DC-3/Caribou size aircraft. A de Havilland Twin Otter didn’t seem cost-effective, and the […]

With everybody enamored of machines that aviate without the interference of humans, “Unmanned Air Vehicles” are currently a hot topic. Like that Airbus with a cabin full of passengers bound for Minneapolis that flew itself so well it just kept going … 150 miles beyond Minneapolis. See, I just can’t buy that story about two […]

After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles forbade the defeated Germans to build any military aircraft. Nevertheless, perhaps because something forbidden — even a mere apple — becomes irresistibly desirable, Germany in the 1930s surpassed all other nations in aeronautical technology. Two of Germany’s most talented and ambitious designers were Willy Messerschmitt and Ernst […]