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Holiday travels were pretty promising for aviators this year, despite periods of gusty winds. Some rain would have been welcome, but if you’re gonna have a drought, winter is a good time to have it. Every one of these nice flying days is one step closer to spring.
Visitors included a couple of Cessna Skyhawks on training missions, a Mooney M-20C and a couple of unspecified refueling stopovers. Scott Buerge came by with his Beech Bonanza V35B, out of Nevada. The Precision Approach Path Indicator lights are working again, after a couple of years of being out of service. In locally-based activity, both of Butler’s Cessna 172’s were out on proficiency missions and Jon Laughlin flew in his Piper Cherokee 180.
A world-wide news oddity was reported last week, when a Boeing 737-200 airliner was “found” after being lost for 13 years. An old Air India jet, built in 1982, was parked on a little-used Kolkata, India airport back in 2012 and its records were misplaced by the airline. The hosting aerodome finally sent the owners a storage bill for $120,000; it was initially declined with a claim “we don’t own that airplane” but its status was finally discovered. The Boeing is no longer airworthy and was hauled off to a training school for student experimentation, after paying the parking fee.
It appears that the Air Force’s old A-10 Thunderbolt II attack airplanes, a.k.a. The Warthog, won’t be immediately retiring after all. Flown by the 442nd Reserve squadron out of Whiteman AFB, the unique tank-killer jet is been given a stay of execution through 2029. Despite its detractors, the A-10 has special capabilities with its 30mm rotating-barrel cannon shooting depleted uranium rounds. The proposed F-15 replacement is too much airplane for the job.
One of casualties of the recent 100-mph winds lashing the Pacific Northwest is a huge blimp hangar at Tillamook, Oregon, a relic of World War II that currently houses an aviation museum. It’s reportedly the world’s largest wooden structure, hundreds of feet long and tall enough to swallow a fully-inflated airship. Part of the upper framework was torn away by the storms and will be difficult to repair.
In the fall-out from last January’s mid-air collision between a regional airliner and an Army helicopter at Washington, DC, two airliners have recently reported “near misses” with U.S. military planes over the Caribbean Sea while climbing out en route to their destinations. The military aircraft were running without transponders so they couldn’t be detected by anti-collision gear on the airliners, and despite three miles and thousands of feet of separation, the civilian crews are complaining because they weren’t advised of the bogey’s presence. Military commanders are authorized to turn off surveillance output for tactical reasons, and that’s been the case for many years.
Our question of the week was about an aircraft compass located in St. Louis: Does it point to True North. No, said reader Mason Dudley, it’ll be off a few degrees because the alignment of magnetic north differs from true north. When I made up the question, I assumed that the zero-variation line was at STL, but I since found that the zero isogonic line has now moved over to Columbia. For next week, what is the Armstrong Limit of altitude? You can send your answers to kochhaus1@gmail.com.