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Even if you could find the airport in the dense fog, there was no chance of flying on several socked-in mornings last week. The prevalent one-quarter mile visibility and 100-foot ceiling extended over much of the mid-section of the country. Butler was fortunate in that it usually cleared off by mid-day, but Kansas City stayed below minimums most of Christmas day.
The unusually warm weather presaging this week’s cold blast invited many aircraft to take wing. The advisory frequency was alive with radio calls and we saw several Skyhawks and Warriors on the local runway. Locally, Randy Miller and Lance Dirks had flights in the club’s Cessna Skyhawk and Will Cook and I had it out as well, Jeremie Platt flew to Fliars Club breakfast in his Grumman Tiger, I took the 1946 Aeronca Champ up and Jon Laughlin flew in from Foster with his Piper Cherokee 180.
A few weeks ago there was much cheering and congratulating over the first “save” recorded by a King Air turboprop equipped with Garmin’s Autoland emergency self-landing system. Supposedly the crew passed out due to pressurization failure at 23,000 feet and the Autoland came to life and took over, landing the airplane autonomously at Denver’s Rocky Mountain Metro airport. Last week, the truth came out; the pilots were on oxygen, not incapacitated, and decided to let the system go ahead and play out after it activated, rather than cancel it. There was no robotic save from certain death.
Last month’s 43-day government shutdown took a toll on the FAA’s air traffic controller training academy, when 500 trainees quit because they were not getting paid. The critical shortage of certified ATC controllers can ill afford that loss of replacement trainees, according to FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, testifying before the Senate’s Aviation Subcommittee week before last. Working controllers were not getting paychecks during the shutdown either, so I guess going without is just part of the training.
On the Thursday evening before Christmas, one of the Air Force’s big C-17 cargo planes suffered a nosegear collapse during landing at Charleston, SC’s International Airport, closing down the runway and diverting traffic to the alternate strip. It took a while to get the big whale back on its feet to reopen the pavement. No airfield damage was found from the impact.
Earlier this month, a Boeing 737 pilot for Mexican tour carrier Magni Charters locked himself in the cockpit with a load of passengers on board, waiting to go from Mexico City to Cancun. He was protesting because he hadn’t been paid for five months and had been forced to buy his own navigation charts. The police broke in and took him to jail; the flight left late, hopefully with pilots who had been promised to be paid for the trip.
Our weekly question from last time concerned the definition of the Armstrong Limit of altitude. It’s the height at which humans cannot survive without a pressurized environment, about 63,000 feet, above which their blood boils away without atmospheric pressure. For next week, what are “decelerons?” Hint: found on B-2 Stealth bombers. You can send your answers to kochhaus1@gmail.com.