Aircraft

As I think back over my life, I can come up with only one day I remember. Really remember. Oh, I remember graduating from high school, but I don’t remember anything else about the day. I remember watching the birth of my daughter, but I have no idea what I had for breakfast on that […]

The first happy customers will be receiving their Cessna Citation CJ4s later this year, following last week’s announcement that the FAA has granted type certification to the latest light jet from Cessna. The $9 million (2010 dollars) CJ4 shares a type rating (including single-pilot operation) with the rest of Cessna’s CJ series. With an NBAA […]

It’s every pilot’s nightmare. During an emergency landing on a Hilton Head, South Carolina, beach, an amateur-built Lancair IV-P struck and killed a pedestrian from behind as he walked the shoreline with headphones on, listening to music. Neither the pilot nor his passenger was injured, and the airplane ultimately came to rest in the surf. […]

New wing and engine designs, plus advanced systems and avionics, make Cessna’s newest light jet its best ever.

The controls felt like a Citation CJ, but the numbers on the new Collins Pro Line 21 displays didn’t belong to any CJ I had ever flown. Level at 45,000 feet, the true airspeed was 425 knots. And it had taken only 23 minutes to reach that rarified altitude after a near-maximum weight takeoff. How […]

Our crew began to assemble in the lobby of the Barcelona hotel. Outside on the street, pilots and flight attendants from the arriving flight collected their bags from behind the jitney bus that had driven them from the airport. They shuffled into the hotel. One of the arriving flight attendants murmured something about the electronic […]

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 […]

The scoop on engine conversions.

Sitting at Mickey’s Diner in Enfield, New Hampshire, across the lunch table from my almost 90-year-old father, I tell him about the heater on the Cheyenne. The heater had stopped working on a flight from Tampa to New England. It got very cold up there at 25,000 feet, so we landed at Westfield-Barnes Airport in […]

Eurocopter announced last month it was developing new technology to reduce the noise generated by helicopter rotor blades. The company has named the new developments “Blue Edge” and “Blue Pulse” technology, and has tested them on an EC155. The reshaped Blue Edge blade tip reduced noise by up to 4 decibels with its cranked leading […]