Tabla de contenidos para May 2023 en Flying

ILAFFT Obsolete? I’m disappointed in John Folk’s account in the latest issue of FLYING [“Iced-Up Mooney, April/Issue 936] As a major airline pilot, 20-plus years in the industry, and almost 30 now as an aviator, [I feel] Mr. Folk’s account of what happened breezes past poor aeronautical decision making and seems to highlight ATC as a protagonist of sorts. He concludes with his Mooney Ovation parked with ice accumulation still on the aircraft with some noted on the cowling intake! There is no reason to believe that ice was not on the horizontal stabilizer as well, but [perhaps] that was conveniently omitted by the author. Also, this feature of FLYING is almost obsolete. If pilots, specifically those of high-performance aircraft, do not know the myriad of threats they face by…

SEVEN DAYS AFTER my first solo in the iconic T-37 while in U.S. Air Force pilot training at Williams AFB in Chandler, Arizona, I found myself strapping in for my second solo flight. To be sure, I was excited. The T-37, “Tweet” as it was affectionately called, was a small twin engine jet trainer that’d been in the USAF inventory since the late fifties. Maybe when it was brand-spanking new, the crews that flew it were awestruck. But by the time I began training in that little sucker in the early ‘80s, it was kicked around as the ugly sister to the more beautiful and much better-performing T-38 Talon. But, your first jet is always your favorite. OK, not really, at least not my feelings about the Tweet. But I…

“BIGGER IS BETTER” is Dassault Aviation’s mantra for its next-generation business jets. And that was unmistakable when I walked up to the new Falcon 6X at the company flight test facility at Istres-Le Tubé Air Base (LFMI) west of Marseille. The aircraft looks positively plus-sized compared to its svelte predecessors, including Dassault’s current Falcon 8X flagship. The Falcon 6X is, by far, Dassault’s largest, heaviest, and most powerful business jet in the 60-year history of its business jet production line. The 6X represents a sea change in Dassault’s design focus. Falcons always have appealed to pilots, engineers, and technicians—lean, nimble, and hyper fuel-efficient. Now, passenger comfort has become the top priority. The latest Falcon jet offers a wider floor and taller cabin than any other purpose-built private jet in current…

SERVES 3 HANDS ON: 15 minutes TOTAL: 45 minutes 1 pound ground pork sausage1 pound hickory smoked bacon, finely dicedKosher salt and fresh-cracked pepper6 slices American cheese3 large Hawaiian hamburger bunsBarbecue sauce, to serve6 slices cooked baconThick slices sweet yellow onion, to serveThick-sliced tomatoes, to serveHamburger pickles, to serve 1. Using your hands, combine the sausage and bacon and mix gently until evenly incorporated. Gently create six patties, about ¼ pound each, using your hands, and transfer to a baking sheet. Season each patty liberally on both sides with salt and pepper. 2. Open the bottom vent of a charcoal grill completely. Light a charcoal chimney starter filled with charcoal. When the coals are covered with gray ash, pour them onto the bottom grate of the grill, then push to…

THE TANG OF SALT on an insistent, scouring sea breeze, the forlorn cry of wheeling gulls, the glint of September sun on a long line of combers unbroken to the distant horizon—all these are utterly familiar to me in an almost unsettling way, my adopted sensory home base, stage directions for deep-seated sea dreams that wash away on waking. This tableau could well be a stand-in for heaven, or purgatory, or hell in a Swedish arthouse flick. But no, here is my wife Dawn with her dark hair blowing wildly around her, there is my Lab-mix pooch Piper bounding joyfully across the moist sand, and there is our blue-and-neon-green Stinson standing proudly (and somewhat incongruously) just below the high water line with a small collection of other GA aircraft. This…

I LIVE IN THE Seattle area, where we have so much moisture the AIRMET for mountain obscuration is as common as a Starbucks on every corner. For this reason, when I pursued my instrument rating all those years ago I insisted on having at least 15 hours of actual IFR logged before I would take the check ride. I pursued the IFR rating as an exercise in risk management, and it didn’t make sense to me to get the ticket without ever going into the clouds. Logging time in actual conditions isn’t a requirement for the certificate. Nowhere in FAR 61.65 does it say that the applicant is required to register time in real instrument meteorological conditions—it can be either IMC or simulated IFR under a view-limiting device—but I wanted the…

IT HAS OFTEN been said, never more so than by FLYING’s erstwhile editor, Richard Collins, that a single-engine airplane is a better bet than a twin if an engine fails right after takeoff, because the chance of the pilot of a twin successfully handling the emergency is so small. This paradox applies, to be sure, to recips, with their meager surplus power. Turbines have it easier. Still, the single-engine pilot has only one task: land. Twin-engine pilots have their hands full. We generally don’t hear about the successful engine-out emergencies unless in private conversations; most of them don’t come to the attention of the authorities. Maybe there are more than we think. We hear about enough unsuccessful ones, however, to suggest that the challenge can be overwhelming. Expectation plays a…

“NOVEMBER 1750 WHISKEY, copy this number down and call when on the ground. Possible pilot deviation.” Yup. The dreaded words, and just a couple of weeks before the 10-year anniversary of getting my private certificate. It happened earlier this year, departing Van Nuys (KVNY) in California. Below is an excerpt from my ASRS report: [My] first time departing KVNY, and I was given the CANOGA 3 departure. I misread the chart for my given runway and believed the initial turn was a climbing left to a 253 heading. It was a climbing right turn to 213. I had a feeling something was off while still on the ground and asked tower to confirm my climbing left turn to 253. I was told, “affirmative.” This calmed me, and I was given a…

KNOCK ON WOOD; I’ve been fortunate not to have experienced an in-flight mechanical event of any consequence with any of the airplanes I’ve owned. Until recently. And despite the seriousness of the event, the aftermath included positive aspects. With my Piper Arrow loaded to its full capacity of four people (including me, two journalists, and an environmental executive director), the Lycoming IO-360 engine decided it no longer wanted to participate at full power. Instead, the engine protested by shaking the airplane with a pronounced vibration barely five minutes into the climb out. As though to scold me, the digits of the engine monitor display began to flash high EGT and high CHT numbers on the number-3 cylinder. I cringed. Although I would find out later that the damage was done…

FLYING’S NOVEMBER 1969 issue contained an article about Rockford, a name which at that time meant what “Oshkosh” means today. “Rockford—Some Second Thoughts” it was called, and its author—“a youthful iconoclast in training for curmudgeonhood,” as the blurb called the then 26-year-old me—deplored the stagnant state of airplane homebuilding and the hobby’s collective failure to live up to the literal meaning of the word “experimental.” The EAA was shirking its pastoral responsibilities as the megachurch of the low-income airplane-obsessed. I—or rather we, since for some reason I used the editorial, or royal, we throughout—took no prisoners. Biplanes, Pietenpol parasols, taildraggers, wooden airplanes, steel-tube-and-fabric airplanes, any Ray Stits design—all came under the acid spray of my splenetic pen. “The less challenging a design,” I railed, “the more cranks, goofs, and simpletons…

As my mother was told, in the fall of 1941, my grandfather Abraham Samuel Dennis was in his early twenties while stationed at Kessler Field in Biloxi, Mississippi, serving as a mess sergeant in the United States Army Air Corps. As the fall season brought about a welcome drop in sticky Southern temperatures, so too came rumors which would soon deploy my grandfather’s unit to a base little known to most Americans. Its name was Pearl Harbor. Though the war raged in Europe, the Pacific theater was still an afterthought to most Americans—especially those like my grandfather living stateside. Abraham, or ‘Abie’ as he was known, had rarely traveled outside the family confines of South Georgia. At the time, Pearl Harbor was a dream-worthy outpost, filled with all things étranger:…

As a flight instructor and former National Weather Service (NWS) research meteorologist, I’ve accepted that pilots like to rag on meteorologists for issuing bad forecasts. Even so, once I got the full backstory behind the pilot’s dissent for a majority of these cases, there was nothing inherently wrong with the forecast; it was how the pilot was trying to use the forecast that was often problematic. This is not to imply that meteorologists are always accurate in every forecast they issue, but pilots tend not to appreciate the hard limitations these forecasts demand. A terminal aerodrome forecast, simply known as a TAF, is perhaps the most difficult forecast any meteorologist will ever make. Think about the challenge these forecasters face. A TAF is essentially an hour-by-hour forecast for conditions significant…

IF YOU'RE BEGINNING to entertain the idea of purchasing your first airplane, you likely have dozens of aircraft reviews and buyers guides bookmarked in your browser. You’ve probably learned how important it is to match an airplane’s capabilities to the sort of flying you expect to do most often. And if your daydreaming has evolved into analysis, you might have already begun to narrow your choices down to a handful of potential candidates. So you decided to get into a flight sim and may not know where to begin. Although an abundance of online guides and videos exist, I find them often overblown—too lengthy and filled with fluff. I would prefer to just give you the facts, introducing you to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and what is needed to run…

UNTIL NOW, SELLING an airplane for me has been a matter of making hangar room to accommodate and getting money to pay for a newer, faster, cooler airplane. Not this time. The insurance industry and the FAA’s good doctors of Oklahoma City have seen to that. I hope they are pleased with their work. Since single-pilot jet operations in our Cessna Citation CJ1 were no longer doable, my wife Cathy and I decided we had to sell our best airplane. Fortunately, our good friend Mike Shafer of JetVx agreed to broker this surrender and oversee our misery. Soon glamour shots were taken, blast emails were sent, and advertisements in multiple outlets were placed. The hot market was cooling by the time I finally faced facts and consented to sell. At…

THE FLEDGLING AIRLINE Lake Central Airlines, like others of that era, took flight in the late 1940s with a single Beech Bonanza on a scheduled route between Indianapolis Weir Cook Airport (now International, KIND) and Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport (KLUK). And its founder was the accomplished, famous, and oh-so-flamboyant Roscoe Turner (alas, without his pal Gilmore the Lion). I knew some of the guys who flew for Lake Central Airlines through the 1960s and ‘70s as the CAB-subsidized airline grew and acquired larger, more sophisticated equipment. When my sister Mary was hired as an LCA stewardess in the early 1960s, they had graduated from the Bonanza to Douglas DC-3s. Now, if you knew Mary then (or now), you’d wonder how a tooth-achingly sweet and innocent (unlike her little sister) lady enjoyed…

THE DASSAULT FALCON 10 drew its legacy from the Mystère 20, then renamed the Falcon 20—and upon its debut promised to be the fastest business jet in the newly-formed category created in the 1960s by Lear and Cessna. The 10’s first flight saw pilot Hervé Leprince-Ringuet and Jean Coureau at the controls, departing from Bordeaux-Mérignac airport (LFBD) on December 1, 1970. According to the June 1975 issue of FLYING, it tallied a 1,000-km closed-circuit speed record at 502.2 knots. Thrust into the skies originally with twin General Electric CJ 610 engines, the “little fighter” notched amazing performance that required a bit of dialing back to succeed on the market. But it did, and the mount is still in service with corporations large and small in the U.S., such as the…