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As with most holiday weekends, flying weather had its moments over the Independence Day break. Rain showers could pop up anytime in the unstable air, and they did—not all bad, firefighters would agree. Anyway, before the frontal disturbance came through there was considerable flying done.
Among rhe week’s visitors were a Piper Warrior, a Cirrus SR-type and a Cessna Skylane, plus a Tecnam trainer from Olathe. Randy Shannon hopped over from Drexel in his Zenith CH-750SD. Locally, Randy and Betti Miller took the club Skyhawk out, then I flew it up to Pleasant Hill, and I also exercised the old 1946 Aeronca Champ. Instructor Delaney Rindall reports 15 hours of flight training done this past week.
Upcoming this weekend is the big Tarkio, MO airshow, up in the northwest corner of the state. Congressman Sam Graves and his friends always put on an impressive celebration of aviation. The NOTAM is effective at 5:30 Friday afternoon and stays on through Saturday; check for field closing times.
A 19-year-old “influencer” got himself in hot water this week while attempting to fly to all seven continents. Wanting to collect clicks for his podcast, the young American departed on a flight plan out of Punta Arenas, Chile, but took an unauthorized side trip to land at Chile’s base in Antarctica, which is forbidden. He’s cooling his heels in a Chilean jail for his stunt.
The U.S. Air Force is attempting to retire all of its A-10 “Warthog” Thunderbolt II tank-killer airplanes next year, allocating $57 million to “decommission” all 162 of them. That equates to about a third of a million to put each A-10 out to pasture, with their ground-support role being assumed, in a very expensive and less capable manner, by F-15 and F-35 jet fighters. Nothing else does what the old flying dump truck does.
Yet again, an expedition is being mounted to locate Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, lost in 1937 while she was making her last publicity-seeking flight, a trip around the world. Her disappearance in the vast Pacific has been the subject to much speculation over nine decades. Now, a bunch says they’ve located something that could be her plane via satellite imagery near the island of Nikumaroro. They’ll be going looking for it next year. We’ll await results with breathless anticipation, one more time.
The question from last week’s column was “what planes were built at the dual-purpose Fairfax car plant in the 1950s?” Not to be confused with the B-25 bombers built there during World War II, they were Republic F-84F jet fighters, assembled on the ground floor while Buick-Oldsmobile-Pontiac cars were built on the upper deck. For next time, all runways served by an instrument approach are required to have a set of white threshold stripes painted on them. How many are in each set at Butler airport? You can send your answers to kochhaus1@gmail.com.
