Table of contents for April 2023 in Plane & Pilot

It’s not so much an emerging aircraft as an emerging family of aircraft or, if the technology pans out at larger scale, a new paradigm for propulsion. Jetoptera has been developing this concept for a while now, and its latest scale model, without question, puts on an impressive performance using the new propulsion system. Qualifications and questions to follow, but the idea as best we understand it is that the system uses a power source—designers are bullish on gas generators—to provide straight thrust that’s then ducted around the craft to wherever the aircraft designers want it to go. In theory, and in Jetoptera’s concept drawings, that thrust could go into oval tube thrusters that could be vectored. Vectoring the thrust or just tilting the thrusters could be used for VTOL…

The near-miss on the runway at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City in January got a lot of attention, and for good reason. The near-collision happened when an American Airlines 777 preparing to depart for London taxied onto an active runway as a Delta Airlines 737 bound for the Dominican Republic was already on its takeoff roll, reportedly already at better than 100 mph. The AAL flight had a combined 152 passengers and crew onboard; the Delta Flight had 151 in all. Luckily, a sharp controller saw the 777 taxi onto the runway and immediately canceled the 737’s takeoff clearance, which in layman’s terms means, “Stop!” And the 737 pilot did, indeed, stop, reportedly about 1,000 feet short of the 777. How did it happen? In part,…

Airplanes are made of many parts, “many” being an understatement, a fact that those brave souls who repair or even restore aircraft are all too well aware of. Airplanes are not the proverbial bucket of bolts, however. They are complex machines with systems, from prop to elevator, integrated in a way that makes them work and keeps them from falling to pieces before our very eyes or, even worse, beneath our airborne butts. What keeps planes together is the humble, little-understood and even less widely discussed family of objects known as fasteners. While they get little recognition this side of the engineer’s heart, fasteners are critical parts of the aerospace world we all know and love. Without them, our flying machines would literally fall to pieces. Fasteners are critical, but…

Small planes are not only a lot of fun, but they also carry with them a fascinating history, replete with more airplanes than any of us can keep track of. There have been thousands of them, most of whose developers had grand production plans but ultimately produced only a handful of planes, if even that. With the cost of entry to general aviation a billion dollars lower than it is for commercial aviation, one of the greatest things about our little niche is that, as they used to say in Austin, we definitely keep it weird—heck, Burt Rutan has been single-handedly keeping it pretty darn weird all by himself for decades. While Rutan is a superstar, there are many more dreamers and designers in the history of light GA (most…

Mystery surrounds the crash of a Yeti Airlines ATR 72 in Nepal, killing all 72 crew and passengers aboard the twin-engine turboprop plane. Two videos appeared shortly after the crash, one taken by a resident near the site of the crash and another a Facebook livestream taken from inside the plane’s cabin. The flight had originated in Kathmandu and was headed to Pokhara, a 30-minute flight. Pokhara is the gateway to the Himalayas and a popular trekking jumping-off point. The weather looked a little hazy but otherwise excellent, and from the video taken by the Pokhara resident, the wind didn’t appear to be a factor. That ground-perspective video, which stops just as the ATR is dropping a wing and before it spirals out of control, shows the regional airliner clearly…

THE MYSTERY? To many, the concept of flying a giant curved path to get to one’s distant destination makes no sense. How can a curved path be shorter than a straight one? The problem illustrates a dimensional shortcoming of our collective imaginations, that we tend to see the world as being as flat as our big-screen televisions. This is natural. Because the spinning beach ball upon whose surface we live and play is enormous, almost 25,000 miles around at the equator, it seems flat to us. The first notions that it might not be so were observations made by ship spotters, who noted that as seagoing vessels sailed farther from shore, they began to disappear, as if they were dropping off the world’s largest ledge—naturally, sea monsters became a part…

THE ATTRACTIVE WHINE of a turboprop engine is seductive, particularly to owners of high-performance singles such as the Beech Bonanza G36, Cirrus SR22 and Piper M350. There’s only so much load carrying, speed and altitude capability in a big piston engine; eventually, one has to start thinking about “what is the next step beyond this airplane?” When one first moved into high-performance, complex airplanes, it seemed like a whole new world compared to the lesser four-seaters that plodded along at 130 knots, lethargically climbing above 10,000 MSL. But then, reality set in; filling all the seats meant reducing range to stay within the weight-and-balance envelope. Keeping the big-bore Continental or Lycoming happy required careful management of mixture, cooling, fuel pump and various combinations of manifold pressure and engine rpm. Letting…

Colonel Joe Kittinger died in December at the age of 94. A retired United States Air Force officer and test pilot, Kittinger was perhaps best known for his record-breaking high-altitude parachute jump from 102,800 feet (31,300 meters) in 1960. That record would hold more than 50 years. But Kittinger’s lifetime achievements before and after that 1960 jump are remarkable. He was part of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Excelsior, which was designed to study the effects of high-altitude jumps on the human body. Kittinger’s jump set a record for the highest parachute jump that stood for 52 years, until it was broken by Felix Baumgartner in 2012 (which was later broken by Alan Eustace). But even before his record jump in 1960, and certainly afterward, Baumgartner led an insanely remarkable…

Losing engine power in a small, single-engine airplane immediately exposes the flight to additional risk, but in some circumstances, that added risk is a lot greater than other times. The latter applies to the forced landing of a Piper PA-28-Archer II in northern Italy, a landing that defied the odds in a big way. The pilot, a 22-year-old woman named Silvia De Bon, deserves huge praise for a Miracle-on-the-Hudson-level save. The small plane was on a sightseeing flight over the Dolomites, a spectacularly scenic mountain chain in the north of the country, when the plane’s engine quit. It’s not clear how high the plane was when this happened, but it was essentially amidst the peaks, which rise to 11,000 feet. To say there was nowhere to land is a huge…

Sporty’s Learn To Fly Course The 2023 edition of Sporty’s Learn to Fly Course has been updated with a new native Mac app with offline video storage and CarPlay integration. It now has an interactive FAR/AIM tool, additional study through more links in the video sections, and interactive capabilities in the training syllabus. There are also new how-to videos on how to use both electronic and manual E6Bs, more tips on cross-country planning, glass cockpit basics and updated weather sections. For CFIs, SharePlay support in the app is now available with Flight Schedule Pro integration, free instructor resources and detailed student progress tracking. The course is compatible with web browsers, iPad/iPhone, AppleTV, Android and Roku. Price: $279. Available at: www.sportys.com. X-Plane VFR Scenarios X-Plane VFR Scenarios allows pilots to practice…

My morning eagle survey flight had gone well, and the forecast was beautiful all afternoon, unusual for February in northeast Wyoming. My day wasn’t filled with students, like it often was, and I busied myself with logbooks and training records until lunchtime. About the time I was running out of things to do, my boss came in with news that he had a flight for me. Erika Peckham, our region’s Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologist, needed to move an injured great horned owl from Gillette to the Bird Lady in Cody. A note about people who help animals in need: There’s a breed of individual who looks after living things that need help. Sometimes it’s stray dogs and cats, but in rare instances, someone might get enough exposure and…

What could be simpler than moving an airplane around on the ground? Add some throttle to start the wheels rolling, steer with pedal pressures, follow a track to the desired spot. It’s so easy that students are expected to do it with only a few minutes of demonstration and practice. And yet every year, insurance claims are filed and repair shops are filled because somebody made a boo-boo while taxiing. Where do we go wrong, and what can we do to avoid becoming the object of derision from fellow plane drivers who have yet to ding an object? Statistically speaking, it’s hard to get a handle on how many times a year a ground movement goes awry. A few dozen ground-motion accidents make it into the official reports annually, but…