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Stay Down When Under Bridges
Frosty mornings over the weekend only reinforced the changing seasons, as the days shorten and we prepare for Daylight Saving Time to end at Halloween. Flying continued apace during the fine fall weather.
Airport visitors this week included a turboprop Cessna Conquest 1 executive twin, a Cirrus SR22 and a Piper Archer trainer. Local airplanes out were Jay McClintock’s Piper Tomahawk, Jeremie Platt’s Grumman Tiger and BCS’ AirTractor agplane, spreading cover crop seed.
Watch out for falling airplane parts. The few just-built French Elixir composite-construction light sport trainers have all been grounded, since a fatal crash in France occurred after a wing flap fell off a demonstrator plane last month. We’ll have to see what the French authorities come up with in their investigation. Also, on Wednesday, a Cessna 210 Centurion crashed in Louisiana, shortly after takeoff, because the engine departed the airplane. The pilot was able to put the 210 down in a field, escaping major injury, while the engine fell onto a road about 300 feet away. The NTSB will be challenged to determine the cause of that one.
It’s deja vu again; a broken fiber-optic cable disrupted air traffic control at Raleigh-Durham North Carolina last week, causing airline departures to back up for hours. As you may recall, an AmTrac crew dug into a pair of cables at Philadelphia last month, throwing air traffic into chaos for a day or two. No information, no air traffic control.
In other national aviation news, it appears that the huge WW-II blimp hangar at Tillamook Bay, Oregon is not going to be torn down after all; the Port Authority sold the storm-damaged structure to the Vintage Aviation Museum for $1 and OVC so 200 feet of the roof can be repaired. The historic white-elephant building is 1000 feet long and 300 feet wide, with a ceiling 175 feet tall, built when the Naval Air Station at Tillamook stored submarine patrol lighter-than-air blimps between flights.
Also in Oregon, a bit of furor took place last week when the pilot of a Kodiak seaplane took off from the Willamatte River in downtown Portland, which is perfectly legal from watercraft and aircraft standpoints. However, he flew under a bridge after breaking water and before gaining altitude, and that makes it a gray area from a careless-and-reckless standpoint. If he’d stayed on the water just a little longer nothing could be said of passing under the bridge, but instead he appeared to be caught between a wet and a hard place. Under Federal Aviation Reg 91.12, the FAA has broad discretion to take action against his certificate.
Owners of Boze A20 noise-canceling headsets, which cost $1000 or more 16 years ago, can no longer get them repaired. The company says parts are no longer available for the earlier headsets, which had a five-year warranty and could be fixed flat-rate for $300 afterward. About all you can do now when they quit working is trade up to the new A30 at a discount.
The weekly brain-teaser from last week wanted to know the name of the Bates County pilot who made the first flight of the Cessna Citation business jet. Reader Jay Payne knew Milt Sills of Amoret personally, who went on to become Cessna Aircraft’s vice president of engineering. For next time, what was the first airliner with reverse thrust to slow down after landing? You can send your answers to kochhaus1@gmail.com.
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