Inhaltsverzeichnis für March 2018 in Flying

THERE WAS NOBODY TO MARSHAL US IN AS WE WHEELED INTO THE PARKING SPOT. After we shut the old Navajo down and started looking around to see where to go after we got out, a man ran up to the pilot side of the airplane. I opened the little side window and expectantly bent an ear, only to hear him say, “You can’t park here!” “Where can we park?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said, “but you can’t park here!” It was not unusual for this trip. On our monthlong tour of Australian airports, we were discovering that most don’t have FBOs the way nearly every airport in the United States does. FBOs are the wonderful legacy of the roving barnstormers who settled down for a more stable life…

Some pilots believe a great aircraft, like a fine wine, only improves with age. Others turn up their nose at the thought of flying an airplane based on a decades-old design. Passing up a Beechcraft Baron G58 simply because the first Baron flew in 1962 would be a major mistake. The G58 is definitely not your grandfather’s Baron. Aficionados are quick to point out that the 1969 Model 58 was no more than a Model 36 Bonanza fuselage mated to a Model 55 Baron wing and two 285 hp engines (the 55 had only 260 hp). But the new configuration morphed the Baron from a four- to five-seater to a six-seater with club seating. The airplane could carry more and fly farther than the Bonanza, and provided that second engine…

On a perfectly still evening over far west Cedar Park near Austin, Mike Sasser cut a sublime path in his Super Stearman, Big Red, over the picturesque Texas Hill Country. As the classic biplane’s Pratt & Whitney R-985 Wasp Junior radial engine bellowed smoke, David Zabaleta flew the photo ship, a Beech A36 Bonanza, allowing professional aviation photographer Glenn Watson to capture this stunning scene from the doorless cabin. The Stearman has since gone on to a new owner in Switzerland, who flies it performing with a wing walker in airshows in Europe.…

NOT JUST ANOTHER OSHKOSH TALE For well over a month, I would pull my November edition of Flying from the pile on top of the porcelain tank in my library to skim, read and re-skim. Each time, I skipped the story “Oshkosh or Bust,” saying to myself, “Not another Oshkosh story.” Then I placed the magazine in a pile to go to my grandson. My wife, for some reason, returned it to the pile on top of the porcelain tank, and today I picked it up again and was about to flip past “Oshkosh or Bust” again when something caught my eye and I realized this fellow has a different story to tell. I thoroughly loved the concept of traveling to Oshkosh in a series of a variety of planes!…

VULCANAIR CERTIFIES FOUR-SEAT HIGH-WING SINGLE The single-engine four-seat Part 23-certified high-wing is back. While the design had been just about forgotten in the modern world of aviation — Cessna introduced its latest version about 50 years ago with the 177 Cardinal — Italian airplane-maker Vulcanair is the second to have recently certified a similarly configured airplane after another Italian manufacturer, Tecnam, got the FAA signatures in 2015 for its P2010. Unlike the Tecnam, which is a composite airplane, the Vulcanair V1.0 returns to a steelframe and aluminum structure, which was the standard for decades. The power plant — a 180 hp Lycoming IO-360 — is also well-established. This engine can burn 100LL and alternative fuels. Vulcanair claims a 130-knot cruise speed at 75 percent power for the V1.0. While most…

A solar eclipse seemed like the perfect excuse for a cross-country flight to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from San Diego with friends in our recently acquired Cirrus SR22T. My close friend Howard was just as excited for the trip as I was. Our less adventurous wives, not so much. My wife protested, “I don’t get it, why all the travel? It gets completely dark right here in our backyard every single night.” Five years and 2,000 hours later and she is still anxious about flying, but with prodding she agreed to go. It was only two months before the eclipse, but good luck on the internet landed us two acceptable, albeit exorbitantly priced, hotel rooms, the last the town had to offer. I bought a bunch of cheap eclipse glasses on…

Most general aviation pilots dream at some point about owning an airplane. There are no substitutes for the ability to jump into your own airplane and take off wherever, whenever, without any scheduling, time restrictions and costly minimum daily requirements. Or are there? If you’re not flying at least 100 hours per year, full ownership is hard to justify financially. The fact is there are many alternatives to ownership that could make a lot more sense. While these options might not provide the full pride of ownership, they offer great flexibility and, generally, lower costs. An airplane you own outright will cost you a significant outlay of cash each month, even if you are able to find reasonably priced parking, insurance and maintenance. At some point, there will be big…

An aircraft auxiliary power unit serves as an additional energy source normally used to start one of the main engines on an airliner or business jet. The APU is equipped with an extra electrical generator to create enough power to operate onboard lighting, galley electrics and cockpit avionics, usually while the aircraft is parked at the gate. Drawing bleed air from its own compressor, an APU also drives the environmental packs used to heat and cool the aircraft. And most important, operating an APU negates the need to start one of the aircraft’s main engines while waiting for passengers to arrive, thereby saving on fuel and maintenance for a more expensive power plant. In most cases, the APU is shut down before takeoff and reignited when the aircraft clears the…

RELEVANT DISCUSSION: AIM 5-1-3, JO 7930.2, AC 150/5200-28 NOTAM DEFINITION: TIME-CRITICAL INFORMATION THAT IS EITHER TEMPORARY IN NATURE OR NOT KNOWN SUFFICIENTLY IN ADVANCE TO PERMIT PUBLICATION ON AERONAUTICAL CHARTS OR OTHER PUBLICATIONS. NOTAM (D): 1. Information is disseminated for all navigational facilities that are part of the National Airspace System (NAS) and all airports listed in the Chart Supplement. 2. They remain available for the duration of their validity or until published. Once published, the notam data is deleted from the system. 3. Airport operators are responsible for observing, reporting and ultimately canceling notam (D) information. 4. Information includes such data as taxiway closures, personnel and equipment near or crossing runways, and airport lighting aids that do not affect instrument-approach criteria, such as a VASI. 5. All notam (D)s…

One of the things I love about living and cruising aboard Windbird is the way it drastically simplifies and slows the frenetic pace of modern life. Where most of my flights are of a few hours’ duration, passages under sail are measured in days and weeks. Three hours on watch, three hours off, ad infinitum — punctuated by meals, occasional tweaks to sail trim, rare encounters with other vessels and the welcome scream of the trolling reel when dinner takes the lure. During night watches in particular there’s a lot of time to read, and to think. On a recent five-day passage from South Carolina to the Bahamas’ Abaco Cays, I devoured the book Hill billy Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance. It…

Blame it on “alternative facts.” Or maybe it was “fake news” — the 1930s version, anyway. It turns out that the controversy over competing claims of who really was first to fly — the Wright brothers in 1903 or German-born immigrant inventor Gustave Whitehead two years earlier — can be traced to a, let’s call it “problematic,” article that appeared in the January 1935 issue of this magazine, back when it was known by its original name, Popular Aviation. The assertions put forth in the lengthy article and repeated for decades by Whitehead supporters seek to prove that the itinerant tinkerer and amateur aeronautical engineer, living in Bridgeport, Connecticut, piloted a heavier-than-air flying machine in 1901, well before the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. If not for the Popular Aviation…

The visual of large blue and green aluminum fragments floating in the ice-laden Potomac River as we descended on our approach into Washington National Airport is still vivid enough to remain locked in my memory. The evening prior, Air Florida Flight 90, a Boeing 737-200, had crashed into the 14th Street Bridge just after takeoff during a nasty snowstorm. I remember the date because the ink hadn’t dried on my ATP certificate, my having passed the check ride only one day before. The dramatically documented accident occurred on January 13, 1982. Although many other significant factors contributed to the tragedy, the event became a watershed moment for the airline industry, bringing increased awareness to the dangers of airframe icing. Most of us understand that icing deforms the surface of the…