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Our last-week flying weather in the lower midwest was favored by open skies and hot south winds, escaping the Canadian wildfire smoke that covered the northern states with low visibility. Mid-Missouri did suffer from heavy thunderstorms and flooding rains. From the air, crops here in the border counties look pretty stressed; too much rain early, soggy stands and now risky moisture prospects.
Traffic continued light in the summer doldrums; a few Cessna trainers and a 1948 Cessna 170 came in, the latter from Grain Valley airport via Olathe. Locally, Randy Shannon had his Luscombe 8A out and the Koehn Skyhawk flew several hours.
Some clarification might be in order regarding last week’s City Council notes. “Hiring” an airport manager might be a little too prosperous-sounding, since there’s no salary connected with the position. Commercial pilot and flight instructor Jay McClintock has agreed to assume the largely-ceremonial title, which traditionally has been only compensated for with hangar space and a few other perks. We all welcome Jay and will help him any way we can.
The U.S Air Force has announced that the new B-21 Raider stealth bomber, designed to replace the B-2 Spirit, will have a manned crew aboard; there was speculation that it was “crew optional” and could be operated remotely. The value of having humans operating the systems has been recognized and the B-21 will fly with two in the cockpit. It continues under testing at Edwards AFB in the California desert.
From Italy comes a fortunate news report of an amphibious Canadair CL-415 “super scooper” fire-fighting airplane inadvertently plowing into a cable dangling from a fire-fighting helicopter, which was using a dangling bucket to dump water on the fire. The cable sawed the wing back to the main spar but stopped there and the ‘copter escaped with a breakaway, so tragedy was averted.
Well, this one wasn’t Boeing’s fault. Last month, a Lufthansa 787 airliner was being worked on at Frankfurt airport before leaving for Los Angeles when the nosegear collapsed, dropping the fuselage and nacelles onto the ramp and injuring 23 workers. An investigation revealed that the downlock pin that’s supposed to be installed when parked was found in a storage holder, not in the nosegear. An expensive mistake.
From last week, our head-scratching question was about the designer of the Israeli Air Force’s first fighter planes, put into service when the country was established in 1948. It was none other than Willy Messerschmidt, who created the Luftwaffe’s Me-109, copies of which were built in Czechoslovakia and used after World War 2 in many places. For next week, our question is “What’s the A-10 attack plane’s official name?” It’s not the “Warthog.” You can send your answers to kochhaus1@gmail.com.
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