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Amelia’s Fate Remains Unknown
Enjoy it while you can, pilots. Last week’s weather was near perfect, unless you were heading out to the intermountain west. Some of that rain is headed our way, but the dry air soaks up a lot of the falling showers. Flying through the thin rain is generally safe, as long as you can see through the shower.
A few transient aircraft arrived this week, including a Piper Malibu cabin-class single, an RV homebuilt, a Cessna 182 and a pair of Piper Archers. Locally, Lance Dirks flew the Cessna Skyhawk, as did Gerald Bauer and Randy Miller, and the Piper Super Cub departed, leaving yet another empty hangar.
This coming Saturday is once again time for the Fliars Club to assemble for the breakfast flyout decision. All Fliars are summoned to fall into ranks at 0730 hours if they wish to participate. No, don’t reset your clocks until that night; we’ll still be on CDST that morning.
In national news, headset maker Lightspeed Aviation is offering a software mod to optimize noise-canceling with the whining Rotax engines, applicable to its $1300 Delta Zulu headphones. It turns out that standard active noise canceling is set up for slow-turning Lycoming and Continental engines, not the Austrian gear-drive Rotaxes. Getting the high-reving noise blocked takes some tweaking. If you can’t afford ANR muffs, stuff in good earplugs.
In view of the recent blocking and shutdown incidents involving the satellite-based GPS navigation system, the Air Force is looking into an alternative system that uses the earth’s magnetic field for positioning. Isn’t that called a compass? Seriously, the Quantum Sensing system is not subject to jamming and would be a badly-needed backup to GPS, which was originally developed for military navigation.
The half-million dollar expedition to the South Pacific island of Nikumaroro by Purdue University, where it was hoped to find the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed airplane from 1937, has turned out to be a bust. The satellite image of what seemed to be metal was found to be branches of wood. So, the mystery of Earhart and Noonan’s disappearance remains unsolved.
Last week, the Canadian Snowbirds jet aerobatic demonstration team put on its last performance with the CT-114 Canadair Tutor airplanes, after 55 years of doing shows for the public. Flown at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, the last hurrah went off flawlessly. The old Tutors are being flown to decomissioning in March. Eventually, the team is to be reorganized using Pilatus PC21 trainers.
A chartered Dassault Falcon business jet had to undergo an aborted takeoff last Sunday at Las Vegas, for unreported reasons. A rejected takeoff at near-flying speed is one of the riskiest emergencies one can undergo in a jet; this time the Falcon 50 wound up nosed into the fence off the end of the runway. All eight aboard escaped injury, including actor and entertainer Donnie Wahlberg, who praised the crew for their quick-thinking.
Last week’s question was, What was the first airliner equipped with reverse thrust to slow down after landing? It was the Douglas DC-6, a four-engine propeller airplane fitted with Hamilton Standard reversing props. This week’s challenge was suggested by reader Rodney Rom: In 1935, the Glenn L. Martin company built two identical bombers for the Army Air Forces, the B-10 and the B-12. What was the difference between them? You can send your answers to kochhaus1@gmail.com.
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