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There wasn’t much reason not to log some flying time last week, after the severe weather moved out and more seasonable rain showers took its place. Other than in the vicinity of those pop-up rains, we had some benign opportunities to commit acts of aviation. If you could stand the spiraling cost of fuel, that is. Despite the stabilized price of crude oil, pump prices never go down as fast as they go up.
I’m always sarcastically amused when somebody says “if you need to go flying, take me along and I’ll chip in for the gas.” First, I seldom have a NEED to go flying (as opposed to a reason) and, second, fuel is only about a third of the plane’s operating cost, maintenance and fixed expenses making up the rest.
Visitors observed at the Butler airport last week included a Piper Cherokee 180, a nice homebuilt Van’s RV-6A, a yellow Piper Super Cub and the ubiquitous Cessna 172. Out of the local fleet, Gerald Bauer took the club Skyhawk up, Steve Koehn flew the company Cessna 172, and the SkyDive KC Cessna 182 was pressed into service to haul jumpers, in the absence of the big Caravan 208B.
Nationally, about 2,000 Spirit Airlines pilots are seeking other employment after their seniority and benefits melted away in the company’s shutdown. They will have to be absorbed, at the bottom of the ladder, by pilot-shortage slots left by retirees at other airlines. That thwarts the plans for instant hiring by flight school graduates just entering the workforce. Meanwhile, ex-Spirit crews have been given free rides back home by other airlines and perhaps a free meal or layover cot by their brethren.
The ancient B-52H bombers operated by the U.S. Air Force are scheduled to be retrofitted with new engines (again), this time with Rolls-Royce F130 fanjets replacing the Pratt & Whitney TF-33 motors, which were state the art over the original straight turbojets. The old Buffs are going to kept in service at least until 2050, an astounding 100 years after the first B-52 came out of the Boeing plant. It’s just sad that we have to depend on foreign engines for our military airplanes.
The airline newsmaker of the week was, of course, the United 767 that clipped the cab of a semi on a roadway outside the Newark airport on Monday. A light pole also got snapped off; thankfully, nobody got hurt. The pilot got a little too low, faced with a short runway at Liberty Airport at the end of a long day’s flying from Venice, Italy. One tire got scuffed from the truck and a hole was poked in the fuselage by the pole.
A weirder event took place at Denver on Saturday when a Frontier Airbus A321 hit a man on the runway during takeoff, who had evidently scaled the airport fence with suicidal intent. The pilots were able to get stopped successfully, despite a fiery compressor stall from the deceased individual being sucked into an engine. A few injuries resulted from the rides down the inflatable evacuation slides.
In 2022, a Boeing 737-800, operated by China Eastern Airlines, crashed in southern China for unexplained reasons. Last week it was announced that our National Transportation Safety Board has found evidence in the airplane’s flight data recorder of both fuel cut-off switches being turned off and control input to create a dive from 29,000 feet, showing deliberate intent by one of the pilots. Previously, the close-mouthed Communist Chinese government investigators, unwilling to disclose findings disparaging to the state, had found nothing wrong in the wreckage where 132 people died. Now, the horrible reason behind the crash has come out.
Our previous question wanted to know what kind of airplane was used to spray Agent Orange defoliant in Vietnam? Mostly, they were Fairchild C-123 Provider cargo planes. For next week, tell us when the first pilot’s licenses were issued by the U.S. government. You can send your answer to kochhaus1@gmail.com
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