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A Cirrus’ Wild Ride
Getting airborne required some patience and ingenuity last week, waiting out some storms stagnating over the mid-section of the country. The sun popped out for brief periods last weekend, and the Blue Moon on Sunday night beamed brightly.
Local flying activity included Randy Miller and myself, taking the club Skyhawk out for separate spins. The SkyDive KC Cessna 182 flew a few sorties with jumpers but had to stand down for much of the weekend.
It’s a good idea to check Notices To Airmen before flying around the metro areas. If you’re heading to St. Louis, be aware of the big airshow at Spirit airport this weekend, starting Friday. It’ll tie up airspace below 15,500 feet as the military struts it’s stuff. And the much-vaunted FIFA World Cup soccer tournaments in Kansas City are already generating TFRs over the venues, primarily drone-free areas right now, but certain to expand to inhibit general aviation as the games run through mid-July.
In week-ago-Saturday news out of Austria, a paraglider pilot flying over the Alps was ran over by an errant Cessna. The plane sliced through the powered-parachute’s canopy, escaping unharmed, but the paraglider pilot had to go to the manually-deployed reserve chute, landing with bruises after the harrowing descent. Pilots need to look outside for canopies, not just stare at navigation screens.
A Washington state study has determined that the 3 billion gallons of “sustainable” jet fuel that was supposed to be produced each year by 2030 is more likely to be just over 2 billion, due to a shortfall in feedstock material used to make the non-petroleum fuel. One can make burnable diesel-type fluid out of almost anything, but not always in a practical fashion. We’re going to be flying on dinosaur juice for a long time yet.
In a similar hoped-for Green initiative, Dutch airline easyJet is considering “taxiing” their Airbuses to the runway with an electric robot tow tractor, rather than firing up the plane’s engines at the gate.
They would start only at the last minute. The cabin comfort will still have to be maintained by the ship’s auxiliary power unit. It will save, they say, about 55 gallons of fuel per flight. The lowered emissions have to be considered in light of the electricity used.
Back in April, a Cirrus SR-20 pilot flying near Chanute, Kansas heard a loud noise up front and determined he was now flying a glider. Unable to coast to CNU airport, he did as he was trained and pulled the Cirrus whole-airplane rocket-deployed parachute, which worked as advertised. They floated down under canopy and upon hitting the ground found themselves being drug downwind by the big chute, across fences and ditches. They were able to get the doors open and extricate eventually, after a pickup driver blocked their careening plane. That’s one Cirrus that won’t fly again.
The week’s question was “what nation was second to put a jet airliner into service, after England’s Comet in 1952?” That would be the Soviet Union, with a TU-104 in 1953, a Russian bomber modified with windows and seats. For next week, we’re asking “how fast do jet airliners move when taxiing with idle power?” You can send your answer to kochhaus1@gmail.com.
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