.JPG)
Common to every conversation this spring, especially amongst aviators, is the comment, “ain’t it been windy this year?” It does seem that flying has been frustrating and challenging, in dealing with gusty air movements. Flight training has been particularly hampered, because student pilots need good air, so to speak, in order to perfect handling skill.
No flight school, however, has been hammered as badly as our commonly-seen neighbors from Downtown Kansas City airport, ATD Flight Training. Their red-striped Piper Archers drop into Butler regularly, as part of their training circuit, or at least they did. Last week, a sudden early-morning downburst caught their entire fleet parked out in the open on the MKC ramp. Eleven airplanes were blown away, crumpled against fences and levees. Their loss presents great difficulti in keeping the academy going, because replacements can’t be obtained for months or a year, even if insured.
Traffic coming through this week included a return visit by the Turbo Commander executive twin, and veteran CFI/Examiner Ron Albertson, who was in from Olathe with Tom Bowles in Tom’s Cessna Turbo Skylane RG. Locally, the AirTractor sprayplane made some runs, Shawn Hoenshell and I flew the Aeronca Champ, Eric Eastland exercised his dormant Cessna Skyhyawk, Drake Cashman made a Nevada-Pittsburg flight and I ventured to Higginsville, both via Cessna 150s.
The giant SpaceX SuperHeavy Starship rocket finally launched from the Boca Chica,TX spaceport Thursday, but it exploded in a ball of fire as it passed through 128,000 feet on its way to space. Owner Elon Musk termed it an “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, to put it mildly. Back to the ol’ launch pad…
A Russian SU-34 fighter-bomber pilot who was supposedly inflicting punishment on long-suffering Ukraine had a bad day last Thursday, when he pickled off a round over the wrong village. Instead, the bomb fell into the middle of a town 25 miles inside Russia, blowing a crater in a roadway. “Oops-sky, I musta misread my Glonass”; that’s the Russian equivalent of GPS.
Southwest Airlines continues to make the news, badly. Another failure in its aging flight scheduling system caused over 1800 cancellations Tuesday morning, after similar meltdowns earlier in the month,
and then Thursday a surly passenger got into a brouhaha with a flight attendant over a crying baby during a flight holding over Orlando, forcing a diversion to deplane the complainer. Folks, don’t mess with a flight attendant; they are in total charge of the safety of the cabin and you will pay severely for disregarding their orders, by Federal law.
We last asked about “The Man Who Rode The Thunder”; it is the title of a book about William H. Rankin, who had to eject from his F-7 Crusader jet at 47,000 feet over a thunderstorm in 1959. He spent 40 minutes being blown up and down in the storm before it spit him out. For next week’s question, name two types of aerial refueling systems used by the military. You can send your answers to kochhaus1@gmail.com.
