Indice dei contenuti per July 2023 in Pilot

Significantly, the Light Aircraft Association is the only game in town when it comes to revalidating Permits to Fly for a large segment of the UK GA fleet, especially since it has added to its portfolio an increasing number of ‘orphan’ production aircraft previously looked after by the Civil Aviation Authority. In the days when the CAA was losing its corporate expertise through the brain drain to EASA, not to mention employees skipping off to set up their own consultancies, this could only be seen to be a good thing. Who better to administer small ‘Permit aircraft’ than a body staffed with people steeped in light aviation, supported by equally experienced volunteer inspectors, many of whom had built their own aircraft and really knew the ins and outs of both…

Imagine this. Your daughter is at university studying history of art, she funds her course with a student loan and works part-time in a coffee shop to pay up her living costs, and you, an indulgent parent, slip her the odd hundred pounds for the city breaks to which all students are entitled these days. Neither you nor she are on the line for any other costs. Your boy, Harry, aeroplane-mad since a toddler, decided he wants to be a commercial pilot. He is now eighteen and has a clutch of A-Levels. He studied diligently at school and dispensed with thoughts of a gap year or even going to university. All he wants to do is get his pilot’s licences and join an airline and earn money. It was a…

Unexplained accident Aircraft Type: Flight Design CT2K Date & Time: 24 March 2022 at 1400 Commander’s Flying Experience: PPL, 2,677 hours (of which 1,621 were on type) Last 90 days: 20 hours Last 28 days: 9 hours The pilot was a member of a small aviation group that flew from Temple Bruer airstrip, Lincolnshire, which is located just outside the northern Aerodrome Traffic Zone (ATZ) boundary of RAF Cranwell. On the day of the accident, he planned to fly from Temple Bruer to Beccles Aerodrome, Suffolk, which he had visited on two previous occasions. The weather for the route was clear with light winds from the east. The pilot booked out at Temple Bruer and took off at 1246, climbing on a south-easterly heading. Three minutes later the pilot informed…

Looking back over nearly forty years’ flying experience, I recall a number of incidents and events when I could honestly admit I learned about flying from that, but none surpasses the day in the mid 1980s when, recently qualified to exercise the privileges of my new licence, I rented the club C172 to take my sister and two friends for a ride. I’m certain that the seeds of the incident lay in an antiquated and frankly inadequate training system. However, I make no excuse for my own failings; had I followed my instructor’s advice about keeping a good lookout, especially in the circuit, then a close encounter with a potentially catastrophic outcome would have been avoided. I cannot speak for the standards at other clubs in the 1980s, but the…

Spanish Air and Space Force gets H135s Airbus recently delivered the first H135 to the Spanish Air and Space Force in Albacete. This is the eighth helicopter delivered under the 36-unit contract signed at the end of 2021 to supply the Armed Forces and State Security Forces, and is six months ahead of schedule. Its early delivery will facilitate crew training and the entry into service of the H135 for the 78th Wing at the Military School of Helicopters in Armilla, Granada, where it will perform advanced training tasks for military pilots. Once the planned fleet of eleven H135s are delivered to the Air Force, it will become the primary helicopter for pilot training for the Spanish Air Force, Army, Navy, the Guardia Civil, and other countries requesting…

As we climb away from Saltby’s time-worn tarmac I glance across at Sue Talley and can see she’s profoundly moved by the moment. “Well Sue – you did it. You’ve just taken off from the very same runway your dad took off from almost 79 years ago, on 6 June, 1944!” “This is incredible, amazing, awesome. Thank you so much, this really means a lot, I don’t know what to say.” “You don’t have to say anything,” I reply, “it’s my pleasure. I’m so chuffed you managed to see Saltby from the sky, just as your dad would’ve done.” Sue gazes down at the classic ‘patchwork quilt’ of the English countryside. “It’s just so pretty – do you think it has changed much?” “No,” I reply, “in fact, you can…

‘Bird’ battles on… Bird – Three extraordinary flights. One woman’s remarkable journey by Tracey Curtis-Taylor mirrorbooks.co.uk £16.99. Hardback, 336 pages, colour illustration Tracey Curtis-Taylor’s name first came into prominence in 2013 when she retraced Lady Mary Heath’s 1928 solo flight from South Africa to England in a Boeing Stearman biplane. Tracey’s trip earned wide coverage in the press and became the subject of a popular television documentary. It also won her acclaim and prizes, notably the Light Aircraft Association’s Bill Woodhams Trophy, awarded primarily for ‘a feat of navigation’. In time, while Tracey’s high-profile flying ventures continued there was a growing kick-back from within the GA community, many members of which thought that flying these routes with GPS navigation equipment and often an experienced pilot in the other cockpit wasn’t…

Negative skill transfer? Who knew that was a thing? Having been flying long before the ‘system’ discovered Human Factors and Performance, when such phrases first stated to appear I’m afraid that most of us junior RAF pilots took the opportunity to recover from a good hangover during such lectures – it was treated with a somewhat derisory attitude. I must admit I still struggle with some of the catch phrases and buzz words associated with it all. However, with maturity comes wisdom and slowly we awoke to the fact that this was good stuff, explaining things we’d been aware of for ages – and one of these was now called negative skill transfer – something that had been causing accidents for decades before it had a name! As you become…

STAR LETTER Hand-flying adventures I’d like you to know how much I enjoyed reading the May edition of Pilot, particularly the articles written by Bob Grimstead, Charlie Huke and flight test editor, Dave Unwin. Most of my own operational flying, in the RAF, was in the BAe Nimrod, the ‘Mighty Hunter’ and, like Bob Grimstead, I made a point of hand-flying this 4-jet from takeoff to the top of climb and from top of descent to landing, including an instrument landing approach. Although, on occasion, we would complete a ‘run and break’ over the airfield to join the visual circuit downwind; bet you haven’t done that in a Boeing 707, Bob! When ‘on task’ over the sea we were fortunate to have a ‘split’ autopilot which permitted you to engage…

Dubai is the most changed of all my destinations. I last stayed there in September 1980 when things were very different. Seventies Dubai was one of several small but growing proto-cities around what was then called the Persian Gulf. Their culture seemed little different, albeit perhaps more ‘backward’ and less affluent. There certainly wasn’t the rampant Muslimism of today’s ‘Arabian Gulf’. On my first visit in April 1972, oil had only recently been discovered, seventy miles offshore in Fateh, and merely in small quantities. This revenue began flowing in 1969 but the forward-thinking Sheikh Rashid had already inaugurated a big infrastructure development programme. Dubai’s population was then 86,000, many of whom were Indian and Pakistani construction workers. Now it tops 3.5million – forty times as many. The most modern thing…