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In Flight USA Articles
Contrails: The Dream
By Steve Weaver
Most people dream. Scientists say that in fact everyone dreams, just not everyone remembers dreaming.
Of the ones who do remember, a small percentage will tell you that they have reoccurring dreams. These are the same or similar dreams that return to us, unbidden and seemingly without a waking connection, hijacking our regular nighttime programming.
I’m not sure what opens the door to our subconscious and lets out reoccurring dreams, but no doubt something from our waking hours has touched us. A hope or a fear that we’ve given thought to, or perhaps a reminder from our past has sent an unseen signal that calls for a rerun of the dream.
Flying Into Writing
By Eric McCarthy
Hello world! Welcome to my first column in In Flight USA magazine. I’m excited to share my experiences of the past, present, and future with you. I look forward to bringing you along as I explore my new home in the southwest, present “lessons learned,” and advance my aviation knowledge and skills. This should be fun!
Allow me to provide a little background: I earned my Private Pilot License in 1980, fresh out of college – I’m a long-time flyer, if not a high-timer. My father, an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer, had introduced me to flying at a young age. He earned his PPL and took me up in a rented Cessna 172 when I was in third or fourth grade. It was a short hop from Hanscom Field (KBED), just west of Boston, to Norwood Airport (KOWD), just south of Boston, but that was all it took. To see the world from a few thousand feet was just magical to a young boy! I was hooked! I couldn’t get enough of it! I loved the maps and figuring out the “secret” codes they contained about the airports, terrain, and obstacles. I’d read and cut out pictures of airplanes from his Aviation Week and Flying magazines, often before he’d had a chance to see them – drove him crazy!
What's Up: Service
By Larry Shapiro
I’ve had so much fun thinking about how many times and places we see and use the word: “service.” Here are a few of my thoughts on this important word. (Please feel free to share some of your favorites and not so favorites).
I know I’ll miss some, but for starters, I was in the Service … and I’m very proud of it. How many times have you heard the word used when there is a uniform involved?
I couldn’t guess the amount of service stations I’ve used, and how I evaluated each of them. I still do. Ever wonder why they’re called “Service Stations?”
A great meal at your favorite restaurant with bad service becomes a least favorite place. On the other hand, great service at your favorite greasy spoon or drive through becomes a regular. I’ve always loved this: A good meal served badly ends up being a bad meal. Bad food coupled with good service is what you remember and will go back to.
In conversations about retail stores, hotels, and other places of pleasure, the questions of service always comes up. We can’t help ourselves; we all are aware of the “service” provided.
What's Up:
I know I get credit for more than my share of headaches bending your ears over my favorite subject; “No more third class medical.” I’ve shortened the words for space reasons, but I had little or no support from many of you that it might actually happen. Well, if I were a bettingman,who come to think of it I am, I believe it’s going to happen.
If you know me, you’ve probably heard me use the words, “Pilots have no common sense!” Well, in the end, I am going to be right; we just don’t have too much common sense, and I wish we had more, heck, I’d be happy if we just had some.
Keep your logbooks crossed that I’m right on this one … I have to be. It just makes good common sense.
“Connectivity or Distractibility: One Pilot’s take on Smart Devices in the Cockpit”
By Shanon Kern
As a “Millennial,” my generation has grown accustomed to seeking out and purchasing the latest and greatest smart technology.
We are a connected generation who depend on technology to pay for our coffee, buy our music, reserve an airplane, and control the appliances in our homes. The cockpit, for me, provided a new space to connect with my devices. With a phone and a tablet, I had instant en-route access to my connected world. In theory, I could book a plane, check the weather, and navigate across the country with the same device I use to write this article. Until recently, the use of connected technology in the cockpit seemed like a no-brainer. I found a plethora of different “apps” that allowed me to do almost everything flight related digitally. Soon, I had no need for my analog E6B flight computer. My tablet was much lighter and easier to manage in-flight than sectionals, approach plates, and AFDs. My access to information seemed to be limitless.
Contrails: Twisted Humor Stalks the Skies
By Steve Weaver
I’ll admit it, during the years that I was instructing, as much as I loved to fly and to teach flying, there were times when I needed a break. The years that I was running the little country flight school in the late sixties and teaching eight to ten hours a day for weeks without a break, I sometimes longed for a change of pace. It was hard, unrelenting work.
But the schedule of the flight school dictated the hours that we flew and in the summer, we tried to take advantage of the long days. We harvested every hour that we could to help us stand against the long, dark winter that was to follow, and summer days when I could just relax were few.
So sometimes I did dumb things that amused me, just to break up the routine a bit. It was nothing that I could go on the road with, but those incidents served to give me chuckles and most of the time, they gave them to the whole airport.
Fighting Flight
By Shanon Kern
C-FHAD making a water landing. (Courtesy Shanon Kern)On a warm June day, in Vancouver B.C., my family and I watched in awe as small single engine air taxis took off from the bay and disappeared over the horizon. I could see the amazement and wonder in my children’s eyes as the single engine caravan taxied out to the center of the bay and magically lifted upward. In an instant, I was transported back to my own childhood amazement of flight. My Father, a newly minted commercial pilot, flew the “Sports book” from Laughlin, Nev. to Las Vegas, Nev. every night for the casinos. I was his sleeping stow away. By the age of five, my mind was convinced that I would be a pilot like my father.
By the age of seven, my father had changed careers and stopped flying. Somewhere over the years, as life progressed, I had forgotten about my young dreams of becoming a pilot. I was left instead with a completely unfounded and debilitating fear of heights and flying. I spent my entire twenties distancing myself from the dreams of the younger “me”.
EAA to FAA: ADS-B Mandate Fraught With Hurdles for GA
Cost, Compliance, Lack of Benefits Preventing Adoption
EAA Vice President of Advocacy and Safety, Sean Elliott, told the FAA on Oct. 28 that while the recreational aviation community is willing to work toward a modernization of the national airspace system, mandated ADS-B compliance is still fraught with too many hurdles to motivate general aviation aircraft owners to install the costly equipment.
Speaking at an FAA-sponsored “call to action” summit on ADS-B and NextGen in Washington, D.C., Elliott emphasized that the low installation rate in GA aircraft thus far–only about 6,200 aircraft out of 157,000 in the fleet––is due to a dubious cost/benefit ratio for aircraft owners. The FAA has mandated that ADS-B be installed in those aircraft by 2020 as a cornerstone of the NextGen system.
Learning to Fly in the 1940s
By Charlie Briggs
Charles BriggsAviation buffs read a lot of flying stories from pros who write articles on a regular basis. While often entertaining and informative, hearing from professional pilots sometimes lacks the real world experiences of the hundreds of thousands of aircraft owners and flyers who were never professional pilots, but simply lived with an airplane as a permanent family member. Such is the case with Charlie Briggs, a pilot for more than 65 years, having a career that included ranching, agricultural services and consulting, computer technologies and business concept development. In Flight USA invites readers to join Charlie as he reminisces about flying and life. You will experience a side of aviation that is informative, entertaining and personal. Enjoy.
My father was always interested in flying. He started flying Culver Cadets just as WWII occurred. Of course this stopped all private aviation. At the end of the “curfew,” after the defeat of Japan, Dad resumed his flying, mostly for business purposes. Being in the cattle “order” buying business, having your own plane was a real creative help, especially before the super superhighways and extensive commercial airline network matured.
General Aviation Airport Makes Comeback in Texas
By Dan Namowitz, AOPA
When a private airport south of Lubbock, Texas, invited the public for an October Saturday of flying, food, and family fun, the airpark’s new owner summed things up with this comment on his airport’s Facebook page: “Wow is all I can say!”
The Oct.19 fly-in event at Lubbock Executive Airpark was clearly a hit with area aviation fans who turned out in hundreds to celebrate the re-emergence of an airport that as recently as last spring had appeared headed for other uses. That unhappy prospect had evaporated when Mark Drake, a local businessman and pilot who was keenly interested in keeping aviation alive at the airport, intervened.
Contrails: An Errant Airman
By Steve Weaver
This shot of the Beechcraft Twin Bonanza was taken at the Aurora, IL airport in 1987. (Glenn E. Chatfield)In my early days in aviation, many of the errant airmen that I happened upon were WWII vets and sometimes ex Army Air Corps flyers; as a young pilot, their age and experience seemed to me to afford them a certain license to be… well, different.
One of those types that come readily to mind would be Richard. Richard B. was the owner of a Beechcraft Twin Bonanza and he and the airplane were memorable to me, since they were the only twin/pilot combo that dared to frequent our 1,600-foot sod strip. He was from Elkins, just a few miles to the east of us and he flew the mighty Twin Bo in pursuit of his business as a lumber broker. He also flew it in pursuit of a covert heart’s interest that happened to reside in our town, hence the frequent visits by the big twin.
GAMA Pleased with Introduction of Small Aircraft Revitalization Act in Senate
The General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) welcomed the introduction of the Small Aircraft Revitalization Act of 2013 by U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and
GAMA Files Comments in Support of FAA Airman Certification Standards for Pilot Training
The General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) has filed comments on the draft Airman Certification Standards (ACS) for private pilot and instrument ratings. The comments strongly support the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) efforts to
It's Starting: GA Asked to Absorb FAA Budget Shortfalls
General aviation is wearing the target as the FAA looks for revenue, with the agency appearing to be readying a plan to add burdens on recreational aviators with increased costs for a variety of activities. This is occurring even after the Congress enacted legislation that enabled the FAA to fully fund air traffic services.
Contrails: Bending Metal
By Steve Weaver
The one occasion where the retail worth of the plane in which Weaver was flying was rapidly and substantially reduced. The Ercoupe was later repaired and flown by Joe-Joe for another 20 years. (Courtesy of Steve Weaver)In recent years, even I have had to acknowledge that I have entered, albeit reluctantly, the category of the mature airman. As such, I have joined the ranks of those with a successful (read survived) flying history spanning fifty years or so and it is natural for the August members who inhabit this strata to be occasionally asked by our younger brethren about things that they consider worrisome in their own flying career. Crashing would be one.
How many times, they will ask, have I been involved in occasions where the retail worth of the airplane I was flying was rapidly and substantially reduced?
It’s a complicated question to answer, especially if you take the Clinton-esque approach to it and say it depends on what your definition of crashing is. I choose to do that, since it reduces my record of shame by 50 percent if I don’t count flying the Super Cruiser through the top of a large oak tree as a crash. My point there being that the airplane did not come to a complete stop, which I maintain is a basic requirement for a certifiable airplane crash.
Third Anniversary of the 2010 Haiti Airlift
Three years ago this February General Aviation woke up in a chilly morning to an unprecedented challenge – the aftermath of the 2010, magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti. Like never before or ever since, GA spontaneously morphed into an
Contrails
Remembering Orion
By Steve Weaver
Steve and the flying school Citabria in 1969. (Courtesy of Steve Weaver)He walked through the office door at the airport on a hot July afternoon in 1969, looking like a farmer in his late fifties that had climbed down off his tractor and come directly to the airport. All of this turned out to be good detecting on my part, because that was exactly what he was and what he had been doing before he took a ride to see us.
Orion as it turned out had something bothering him, and it had been eating at him for almost twenty five years. He had returned from the big war, gotten married, raised a family and become a successful farmer and business man, but this little piece of his past was always there and it still nibbled away at the little secret spot where a person lives, even after all those years. He confessed to me that afternoon, sitting in the big armchair in my office, that he had washed out of the Army Air Corps flight training. Even after a generation, I could still see the regret and the shame in the faded brown eyes.
Pilot's Bill of Rights Introduced in House
Companion bill to EAA-supported Senate measure unveiled last summer
By EAA.org
Longtime EAA member Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO), along with Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-IL), have jointly introduced the House version of the “Pilot’s Bill of Rights” that would provide aviators with more protection and access to information in FAA enforcement proceedings.
The bill (H.R. 3816) is a companion bill to the U.S. Senate version (S. 1335) introduced last July by EAA member Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). That Senate bill, which was outlined to aviators by Sen. Inhofe last summer at EAA AirVenture 2011, already has 60 co-sponsors.
Early Adventure in my Luccombe 8A, Part 2
By Steve Weaver
Quitting time came promptly at five o’clock and I was out the door and in my car in a flash. I drove as fast as I could without attracting police attention, to the airport where the Luscombe awaited me, tied securely down in the back row of parked airplanes.
The old Stewart Airpark lay on the west side of the town, hard by the banks of the Ohio River, and was one of the few old-time flying fields that had survived into the 1960s. It was built in the 20s, when airplanes had little crosswind capability, and were constructed to enable a pilot to land into the wind, no matter which way the wind was blowing. The landing area consisted of acres of well-drained sod, some 1,800 by 3,100 feet in size, and from the air it looked like a great, green velvet tablecloth.
Editorial: Happy Election Year
By Ed Downs
The customary greeting for a January editorial would be “Happy New Year.” And, so be it! HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2012 comes upon us with the same promise carried by every new year. All beginnings contain “good news” and “bad news.” It is up to the individual to write history and decide how each day, or year, turns out. But 2012 comes with special promises of good or bad. It is a Presidential election year. The FAA, federal budgets for aviation, private flying and business aviation are going to be topics for political controversy and we, the average flying guy or gal, are going to have an audience as never before. Let’s take a look at the “bad news” first, and then offer some creative solutions. We can make this a winning year for aviation, no mater who wins the election.
With political campaigns now well underway, it becomes clear that our major political parties will continue to ignore the real problems and opportunities facing our country. Instead, the PR firms hired by the DNC and RNC will focus upon inflammatory sound bites, insulting TV commercials, and daily “talking points” memos issued to those seeking election, to be quoted to “target voting groups” like trained parrots (apologies to parrots!). And what, you may ask, do any of these insulting realities have to do with you and your airplane?