Technicalities

The airspeed indicator may be the oldest and most fundamental of the flight instruments, but it is also the one least suited to its job, which is primarily not to tell us how fast we are going but rather where we are in the flight envelope. It is pleasant to know, as we cruise along, […]

Between an inherent tendency to procrastinate, an expectation of lowering prices and a faint hope that the 2020 deadline would—like an affordable substitute for leaded avgas—quietly recede into the indefinite future, I did nothing about ADS-B Out until late this past year. By then, it appeared that the deadline was inexorable and the hoped-for $49.95 […]

Despite the complaints we often hear about the “outdated” technology of opposed-piston engines, the industry has found nothing decisively better with which to propel smaller airplanes. Not for lack of trying: The history of small aircraft engines—in fact, of engines in general—is a freaks’ graveyard. There have been barrel-shaped engines, spherical engines, cubical engines and […]

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 […]

The first free flight of a manned balloon took place, as is well known, in France. The king, who took an interest in the experiments of the Montgolfier brothers, suggested that the passengers on the first manned flight should be two convicts, whom he considered expendable. He was persuaded, however, that the honor of being […]

In 1945, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, precursor of NASA and source of much of our knowledge about practical aerodynamics, published a hefty compendium of airfoil data, NACA Technical Report 824, which later appeared in book form under the title Theory of Wing Sections. The names of the authors, Abbott and von Doenhoff, have […]

I have been inclined to class electric airliners, along with personal jet packs, among the consumer products that will always be almost here. My estimates of the likely future, however, have almost an inverse predictive value: If I say something is utterly impracticable, it will very likely be for sale at Walmart next year. The […]

Someone once suggested that if you want to know how you would feel crossing an ocean in a single-engine airplane, you should just fly out to sea for a couple of hours and then turn around and come back. There’s something about being out of sight of land that, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson’s remark about […]

“There are those who have flown them and those who have not, and it is idle for the former to try to explain matters to the latter.” A Vickers Supermarine test pilot, Jeffrey Quill, was talking about the Walrus, an amphibious biplane flying boat designed in 1929 by RJ Mitchell, who a few years later […]

I used up my entire allotment of blunders for the year in our July issue, where 1) I incorrectly referred to a Robertson STOL conversion as Robinson; 2) I said that the small forward lifting surfaces on the Robertson Wren 460 (a modified Cessna 182) were nicknamed “Wren’s teeth,” when in fact that name applied […]