Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i Flying

They’re everywhere. Through terminal windows, you see dozens of Embraer jets in airline liveries. On FBO ramps you seemingly can’t look in any direction without spotting one of the Embraer business jets—perhaps a Praetor 500 or 600 or Phenom 100. Although it’s most likely one of the more than 750 Phenom 300s that have been delivered since going into service in 2009. It’s been the best-selling light jet for the past 12 years. As Butch asked Sundance in the 1969 movie, “Who are those guys?” To which I add: Why the Phenom 300E? And, what makes that jet so popular? I’ll answer the second question first. It’s a combination of being the fastest single-pilot jet in the sky, the fastest light jet with the highest payload and the ability to…

THIS SPRING, I CELEBRATED three major milestones: 10 years at my current “airline,” 20 years as an airline pilot, and 30 years since starting flight lessons. I’ve been a pilot for nearly three-quarters of my life, and it’s hard to remember a time when the surly bonds could not be slipped. I recently caught up my logbook in preparation for a New Zealand PPL validation, and I’m closing in on 16,000 hours. The country’s authorities also wanted to know my solo time—e.g., sole occupant of the aircraft. The number was surprisingly small, most from way back when I was a Part 135 freight dog. These days, all my work flying is multipilot, but even when puttering around in my Stinson 108, I’m usually accompanied by my wife or friends. I…

YOU KNOW THREE takeoffs and landings will restore your currency, but how many does it take to reach proficiency? For most of us the answer is “it takes as many as it takes.” You may realize you have lost proficiency when you scare yourself—maybe it was a bounced landing or a crosswind that made you go around three times or getting scolded by the tower because you didn’t make a proper radio call that rattled your confidence. If this happens, you may want to consider going up for an hour of dual instruction with a CFI who specializes in the area you had difficulty in—like crosswinds or short field landings. Provided the mistake wasn’t something egregious, resulting in bent metal or broken FARs, go out and practice that particular maneuver…

GERMAN NOVELIST W.G. SEBALD liked to salt his fiction with photographs. They illustrated his scenes so well that I had to wonder whether he staged the photos to match his text or shaped his story to match photos he happened to have. In one of his books, Austerlitz, the title character goes flying at night with pilot friend Gerald Fitzpatrick in a “Cessna.” He describes the mesmerizing sight of the familiar constellations overhead. Now, looking up at the stars from an airplane is an entrancing experience, but no one ever had it in a Cessna. The corresponding photograph, though somewhat distant and blurred, is clearly not of a Cessna but of a small twin-engine, twin-finned airplane that does, however, have a transparent canopy. I got the explanation for this apparent…

Golden Age of Aviation I have read FLYING for more de-cades than I like to admit. I think the new format is the best ever. It is just my opinion, but I think the last half of the last century was the true golden age of aviation. A plane cost about what a car cost, and the powers that be had not reached the lofty pinnacle of today. The ferry flight in my 1948 [Cessna] 170 from Arkansas to Nevada (solid IFR Route 66) was an adventure I will never forget. I met some wonderful people who helped me get home to Reno-Stead [Airport (KRTS) in Nevada]. It was a real gut punch to see the National [Championship] Air Races leave my backyard. I’m too old to pass a medical,…

KEITH ROSENKRANZ has always been a self-described “aviation buff.” A Southern California native, the 33-year Delta Air Lines pilot and U.S. Air Force veteran said he dreamed of flying as he gazed out of a second-story window of his high school located on the north side of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Decades later, Captain Rosenkranz returned to LA, where he commanded a specially chartered Airbus A330-900neo for his final flight at Delta. On board were 112 of his friends and family, including fellow pilots who didn’t get a proper retirement send-off due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. “Back when COVID hit, some of my friends…couldn't get a final flight,” Rosenkranz told FLYING. “My one friend, all he could do was an Orlando [Florida] turn instead of a nice…

Hurricane season is on our doorstep. The Atlantic hurricane season officially begins June 1 and runs through November 30. While the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has not released its official forecast for 2024 as of this writing, in an average Atlantic hurricane season the U.S. experiences 14 named storms, seven of which are hurricanes and three are major hurricanes. Buckle up. Given the likely return of La Niña (one of three phases of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation) and record warm sea surface temperatures in February that are already as heated as we see in mid-July, this is not good news if you were hoping for just a mediocre season. If you live and fly anywhere along the Atlantic coastal plain or the Gulf of Mexico, here’s how you…

IPRESSED THE RED start button on my Electroair ignition system, and all the usual things happened: The starter engaged, two blades turned, and the spark lit off those garbage pail-sized Superior cylinders in my Conti 550. I released the starter button, but something was off. I could just barely hear and feel something besides the pistons firing—the starter was still spinning. Let’s go back a bit. I last flew on December 13—a day trip to East Hampton to meet a TV writer. I left for Israel a few days later, where I spent a month researching my last Leading Edge column. When I returned, I had only a couple of days between my next trip to Miami to race my Kramer motorcycle at Miami-Homestead Speedway. I was going to fly…

AWARE THAT ONLY priority communications were broadcast directly through the stateroom speakers, my wife and I snapped to attention. A sullen, authoritative voice began an announcement. We were told that our last port of call in the Falkland Islands would be canceled because of weather as per the captain’s decision. The new course would proceed directly back to our departure/arrival port of Buenos Aires, Argentina, which would give us two additional days at sea for a consecutive total of four. We were checking the obligatory retirement cruise box along with 2,300 of our closest friends. The trip was enticing because of its primary mission to sail along the coastline of the northern Antarctica Peninsula. In addition, my wife and I were invited to be part of a diverse and colorful…

EMBRAER PROUDLY NOTES that the 300E is one fast single-pilot light jet, reaching Mach 0.80 with just a single carbon-based life form up front. It’s not the first single-pilot jet, clearly, and is likely not the last. And neither was Cessna’s Citation SP the first, but it was among the most accessible and successful of the genre. Tom Benensen’s feature “Cheap Jets Are Here Now” in the June 2003 issue of FLYING recalled Cessna’s game-changer. “When it was first introduced in 1977, the Citation I, either as the two-pilot or the single-pilot I/SP, offered more than 100 design improvements compared to the original Citation (introduced in 1972), including more efficient fanjet engines and an extended, higher-aspect-ratio wing.” Cessna eventually leveraged the Citation SP’s success—a result of its durability and gentle…

IN LATE JUNE 2020, a 40-year-old oil industry entrepreneur and executive left David Wayne Hooks Memorial (KDWH) near Houston alone in his Saratoga. Helped by a tailwind, he arrived over his destination—a private strip 90 miles to the northeast—36 minutes later. It was about 1 o’clock in the morning. The air on the surface was warm and humid. If he checked the weather—there was no evidence that he did—he would have expected to find widespread but patchy cloudiness over the route of flight and at the destination. In some places clouds were broken or scattered with tops at 3,000. Else-where buildups climbed into the flight levels. Ceilings and visibilities under the clouds were good, at worst 700 feet and 5 miles. The temperature and the dew point were only 3…

Piaggio Aerospace boasts a history of building some of the premier airplanes coming out of Italy. Formerly known as Piaggio Aero Industries, the company is one of the world’s oldest aircraft manufacturers, having produced its first design in 1915. The 1920s and ’30s saw Piaggio’s prestige grow. The company added top aeronautical engineers and expanded its capabilities worldwide. And, of course, the firm made significant contributions to Italy’s war effort. POSTWAR REBUILDING Following the devastation of Piaggio’s facilities during World War II, the manufacturer began its postwar re-building process by developing an aircraft that, in some ways, flew in the face of aircraft trends for the time. Until WWII, most airplanes, especially larger ones, sported tailwheels or, in some notable cases, were flying boats. The war saw the development of…

WINTER HERE IN NEW ENGLAND seems to be loosening its grip, the days are getting a few minutes longer every week and what little snow we had is receding quickly. Since I got back into home flight simulation, I look forward to the winter as the cold weather guarantees a few more weekends that I get to spend indoors, guilt-free. The winter makes it easier to schedule a weekend afternoon flight in my flight simulator, no matter what the real weather is doing outside. One goal I set was to begin the BVARTCC WINGS series of training flights, which are self-paced and available to be flown whenever there are live air traffic controllers from the VATSIM service controlling the Greater Boston airspace online. To help complete the WINGS program, I…

FLYING AND DRINKING coffee, flying and listening to good music, or thinking of flying and listening to good music are among the aviator’s most enjoyable moments. “To live is to fly, low and high. So shake the dust off your wings and the sleep out of your eyes,” is a line from the song “To Live Is to Fly,” written by a Texan, the late Townes Van Zandt, and made popular by another Texan, the late Guy Clark. Those songs, along with Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles,” have been long-standing hits on my own aviation playlist. I say aviation playlist, though my ability to listen to music while flying has all but disappeared, and that, paradoxically, is a good thing. Back in the old days, when I flew mostly VFR,…

GROUNDED TOO OFTEN this winter by weather and a head cold that morphed into pneumonia, I was stuck in the house, casting around for stories to tell you. On a whim, I dug into some old logbooks, as well as some diaries from the years between the mid-1960s and mid-’70s, and have been alternately convulsed with laughter, drowned in tears, and flat-out amazed at the number of people I taught (or tried to teach) to fly. As far as I know, none have hurt themselves, their passengers, or their airplanes (well, except me). By 1964, I’d graduated from college, flown briefly for TWA as a hostess, met Ebby Lunken, and worked for his Midwest Airways commuter airline through its good days and bad, accepting a marriage proposal from Ebby and…