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Persistent low ceilings and rain spoiled a lot of flights last week, even as nice weather moved in between storms for the weekend. I heard a gaggle of B-2 Spirit bombers on the departure run Thursday, but they were on top of the weather, safely out of sight.
When the ceilings lifted, there some transient training planes coming through, primarily the Piper Archers from Kansas City Downtown airport. Local flights were the BCS turbine AirTractor spraying sodden fields, Sky4’s Cessna 150s up on student flights, and Jon Laughlin returning his Piper Cherokee 180C to its nest after a sojourn at the farm. Flight Instructor Delaney Rindal now has both 150s back in the hangar, with N704EZ freshly given its annual inspection at the shop in Harrisonville.
Human error can still thwart best-laid plans. At San Francisco on May 13, a United Airlines pilot got his left/rights mixed up and cut across a parallel runway to his left; normal expected turn-out would be to the right, away from the other runway, but somehow the pilot-flying and monitoring pilot misinterpreted their clearance, getting within 300 feet and a half-mile of a regional jet. The safe thing to do is verify what you hear, and still watch out for departures from a parallel runway. Most big fields use separate frequencies for each half of the airport, which exacerbates the danger.
To no one’s surprise, Communist China has spent the last decade or more developing its own airliner, essentially a Boeing 737 clone, using GE/SAFRAN low-emissions engines and other western components. These ingredients make up 40% of the C919 airplane, which will compete directly with Airbus and Boeing, so the Trump Administration has banned further sales of such components to our adversary. Stay tuned for further developments.
Maybe Newark, New Jersey’s airport will stay out of the news for a while, now that its other runway got reopened last week after reconstruction. As with all FAA-supervised projects, final inspection approval will take another week or so, but at least they have a way to get more flights out, with two runways open. That won’t help the short-handed air traffic control, operating from Philadelphia approach-control’s facility. FAA announced last week that they sent in six newly-trained controllers; that’ll help—in about a year, after they get fully-certified.
Last week, our brain-teaser wanted to know where Space X’s big rockets are launched from. I know—Texas--but where in TX? The Boca Chica location, near Brownsville, is now officially called Starbase, Texas. For next week, our question is “what critical component was carried on Charles and Anne Lindberg’s Lockheed survey airplane, which they used to map out overseas airline routes, a half-dozen years after Lindy’s famous New York-to-Paris flight. You can send your answers to kochhaus1@gmail.com.
