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Few aircraft ventured aloft last week, given the inhospitable conditions. We did see a lone Cessna Skyhawk come through, probably out of one of the big training centers around Kansas City, and a few helicopters chattered past. The City snowplow crew took care of the landing strip, taxiway and parking area, so careful use of the airport was possible for emergency services and visitors. Local residents stayed put; braving the cold to shovel a path through the snowpiles wasn’t worth the effort.
Last week’s cold weather even affected space flight. NASA had to call off its planned first moon flight in 50 years, due to frigid conditions at Cape Canaveral. The Artemis spacecraft holding four astronauts won’t blast off until February 8th, if then. Ominously, this past week marked the 40th anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, caused by cold joint seals in the solid rocket boosters on that fateful day.
A tug of war between the Smithsonian Institution and Texas over possession of a retired space shuttle is ongoing. The Shuttle Discovery resides at the Smithsonian’s Udvar Hazy museum at Dulles airport outside of Washington, DC, where it was flown on the back of NASA’s unique Boeing 747 carrier airplane, which is no longer available. But some folks want to get Discovery for display at Houston, where NASA’s flight control center was located, and that’s being resisted because it would mean cutting the spacecraft apart for barge shipment, essentially destroying it. Both Texas senators are pushing the project, even it’s already been rejected once.
Last month’s crash of NASCAR driver Greg Biffle’s private jet at Statesville, NC continues to draw controversy. While Biffle was a licensed pilot, he wasn’t rated for the Cessna Citation, which was being flown by a retired airline pilot. Technically, the model of Citation involved required two pilots, a rule established for all turbojet-powered planes unless granted a specific exemption, which Biffle’s plane didn’t have. The pilot’s son, sitting in the copilot’s seat, had a pilot’s license, but not a jet rating. The Cessna Citation II is easily flown by a single pilot in normal circumstances, legally if so certified, but whether a second rated pilot would have made a difference when something went wrong after the takeoff at Statesville will never be known.
Unlike UPS, FedEx is moving forward on putting its McDonnell Douglas MD-11 cargo airliners back in the air, perhaps by late May. The horrific crash at Louisville, KY, in November, when a left engine fell off of a departing UPS MD-11, led to Big Brown abandonment of all its tri-motor freighters, which it doesn’t plan to use hereafter. FedEx will modify the engine mountings on its MD-11’s to return them to service. There is a shortage of available former passenger airliners that can be converted to cargo hauling, so keeping the existing planes flying makes sense.
Regular reader Rodney Rom knew the answer to last week’s question about the World War II “Blue Spruce” ferry route for Europe-bound airplanes. It was across the North Atlantic, avoiding the Nazi U-boat threat of shipping them by sea, running from the Canadian maritimes to stops in Greenland, Iceland and Scotland. In a more modern vein, where do tourists land when they fly to the Dry Tortugas National Park? You can send your answers to kochhaus1@gmail.com.