Search Results for: wright

Solar Impulse, a Swiss-designed aircraft, made its first flight last week. Its developers hope to eventually fly the Solar Impulse around the world, but for now are satisfied with a “flea hop” of around 1,150 feet at an altitude of about three feet. Still, their first flight traveled almost 10 times as far as the […]

Ed Stimpson, who succumbed last week to lung cancer (despite the fact that he never smoked), stood tall as an advocate for general aviation. Equally important, he was a remarkably effective coalition builder, a skilled negotiator and a pragmatic problem solver. His career record paints that picture. Stimpson was hired to handle public affairs by […]

Let’s be frank. We don’t really need airfoils. Model planes with flat sheets of balsa wood for wings fly nicely; so do airplanes made of folded paper, and bumblebees and butterflies. A flat sheet makes a perfectly serviceable wing. That flat surfaces in the wind could produce the sideways force that we now call lift […]

The Fowler flap was invented around 1920 by one Harlan Davey Fowler, an engineer who was then in the employ of the U.S. Army. An internet search for his name turns up, in addition to various references to his accomplishments in aeronautical engineering, a volume on the use of camels — the two-humped variety — […]

His FJ44 and FJ33 series engines spawned an entire class of light jets, and his ambition was to promote a generation of even smaller turbofans for four- to six-place aircraft. Dr. Sam Williams died Monday at the age of 88. His son Gregg, the current president, will now assume the added role of Chairman at […]

In the mid-60s I was posted to Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, home of Headquarters Strategic Air Command. I was not in the HQ, however, but in the Operations Squadron of Offutt’s Air Base Wing. The ABW ran all the base’s goods and services, we in the ops squadron provided support for all the aviators […]

Every spring the Greater Cincinnati Airmen’s Club held a spot landing contest at Montgomery County (now Dayton Wright Brothers) Airport in Southern Ohio. It’s a non-towered field about 30 minutes north of Cincinnati with a long paved runway pointing southwest into the prevailing wind. I’m sure some wise soul realized that challenging rusty, winter-weary aviators […]

I interviewed a physicist once who told me that the kind of “warp speed” space-bending travel made famous by Star Trek wasn’t theoretically impossible. It’s just that we don’t know enough yet how to make it work. Something about requiring more energy than exists on the planet, at our current state of knowledge, or some […]

One of the sad realities of general aviation becomes apparent upon reading a score or so NTSB accident reports: While true in-flight emergencies are rare, pilots who do not fly for a living have a less-than-stellar record of success when they stare one in the face. It is a blunt corollary to the simple fact that anything a human doesnt practice regularly doesnt get done well the next time its needed. Thats why pilots who take recurrent training every six months tend to have far, far fewer accidents than pilots who only grudgingly take a flight review every 24. No matter how we try to sweep the mess under the rug, skills atrophy fast and anything we dont practice regularly we, sadly, screw up. Those who study human behavior have long been telling us this stuff, they just use bigger words. We know it. We know perfectly well that if we are faced with an emergency when we go flying tomorrow that how we handle it has already been determined. If weve thought about that particular emergency (or one very similar) and how we will deal with it, the odds of handling it correctly are astronomically higher than if we havent given it any thought. If weve actually rehearsed dealing with the emergency in the last six months, the odds that well deal with it correctly go way, way up. Being human, we do well what we do often. We do landings all the time. We dont do fires in flight nearly as frequently.

Charter provider JetDirect Aviation has said it will receive an infusion of private equity capital by the end of this month that is expected to “enable us to begin bringing our client obligations more current prior to closing.” JetDirect President Jake Cartwright, who also headed TAG Aviation before that unit was acquired by JetDirect, has […]