Índex per July 2019 a Flying

Here at Flying we’re always looking for new ways to connect with our audience. Whether that means adding fresh departments and columns to the print magazine; creating new content hubs for the half-million-plus monthly visitors to our Flyingmag.com website; offering a unique perspective on general aviation for the 80,000 subscribers who receive our free twice-weekly Flying eNews blasts; or uploading must-see videos and other captivating aviation content for our 350,000-plus fans on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, being a leading independent voice for the GA community is a full-time endeavor that requires thinking outside the box, inside the box, under the box and—well, you get it. An exciting new way for us to interact with you is the launch of FlyingTV.com, an on-demand video service offering 24/7 access to a vast…

There are some days when absolutely everything is right in the world, and this is one of them. Dawn and I woke up this morning, three days after my 38th birthday, and sailed Windbird 26 miles from the delightful island of Bequia to the pristine Tobago Cays marine park, flying our colorful spinnaker on a sporty 7-knot reach. We anchored near Jamesby Island in 15 feet of ginclear water, bobbing gently in the lee of Horseshoe Reef. Sea turtles and spotted eagle rays frolicked around the boat, and we soon jumped in with them. In the afternoon, we took the dinghy on a snorkeling expedition outside the cut, where the cerulean shallows give way to deep blue depths as a brilliant profusion of sea creatures hunt and feed along the…

To paraphrase a line from The Lone Ranger radio series, “Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear! From out of the past comes the thundering sound of a Cessna 150…Barney flies again.” This goes way back to the olden days—before radio and TV stations employed drones and live traffic cams to report real-time tie-ups and accidents during rush-hour traffic. So far back, in fact, that residential telephones in some areas were still on party lines (ask your grandma or Google “party lines” if that doesn’t compute). It was the 1960s, and we were a pretty close-knit group, mostly in our early 20s, hanging out at the airport. A few were from wealthy local families and could afford to fly for fun; others (like me) were eking out…

ECSTASY IN THE ISLANDS I just finished reading Dick Karl’s ode to Princess Juliana International Airport [“Eleven Minutes of Ecstasy,” April]. He hit the nail right on the head! My wife and I returned from there two weeks ago, staying at the same resort and enjoying the same shared love of aviation with our friends and other visitors, including hundreds every day off the cruise ships. Most of those people probably wouldn’t give a second look at an aircraft back home, and that’s one of things that makes this place so special. We’ve been there 11 times in the last 16 years (though on the airlines, not a business jet!), and wish the good folks of St. Maarten all the best in their continued recovery from Hurricane Irma. Phil Brooks…

Early in the morning of Christmas Eve in 2017, dense ground fog covered some parts of central Florida. The sky above was clear and the forecast called for the fog to burn off by 9 o’clock. Sometime before 7, the pilot-owner of a Cessna 340 asked the Bartow Municipal Airport FBO where he hangared the airplane to tow it out to the ramp edge, so that he would not have to taxi among parked airplanes in the fog. The pilot and four passengers—his two daughters, the husband of one and a friend—were already seated in the airplane when two linemen towed it out and, at the pilot’s request, wiped condensation from the windshield with a towel. They then watched as he started the engines and taxied very slowly away into…

Inflight internet isn’t just for airliners and big business jets anymore. Gogo, the company that pioneered air-to-ground data connectivity a decade ago, today offers smaller, lower-priced gear that’s perfect for turboprops and light jets. The company’s most popular data-connectivity option for smaller business aircraft is the Avance L3 unit, which is now a line-fit option on the Pilatus PC-12NG and is coming to the HondaJet soon as well. Priced from around $30,000 plus installation cost, the Avance L3 ATG system provides passengers with inflight internet access, Gogo text-and-talk access over their personal smartphones, Bloomberg news, weather, inflight map and the option to watch hundreds of popular TV shows and movies, which are stored on the unit’s hard drive so there’s no additional cost to stream the entertainment content. Internet speed…

A lot has happened to the two greatest careers imaginable (to me) since I fell in love with each of them. When I started medical school 53 years ago with the intent of becoming a surgeon, such a career promised interesting work, a middle-class income and a respected role in society. When I got certificate number 1782747 some 52 years ago, aviation was in a heady period of expansion. Though I wasn’t on track for an airline career, I remember Pan American World Airways coming to our undergraduate campus a few years earlier to recruit young (mostly) men to become pilots. Some of the applicants had never been in an airplane. By the time I got out of medical school, some of my college classmates were flying Boeing 707s around…

Despite the complaints we often hear about the “outdated” technology of opposed-piston engines, the industry has found nothing decisively better with which to propel smaller airplanes. Not for lack of trying: The history of small aircraft engines—in fact, of engines in general—is a freaks’ graveyard. There have been barrel-shaped engines, spherical engines, cubical engines and disk-shaped engines, steam engines, perpetual-motion engines, engines with flaps and vanes and sliding and spinning parts in every arrangement that human ingenuity could devise and spatial visualization conceive. Invariably, their inventors asserted that they would be superior to existing engines; almost as invariably, they died in infancy. But hope springs eternal. I received from a friend a copy of a 1997 patent for a novel type of engine. The inventor of the device was a…

We fell in love with David Clark’s lightweight DC Pro X headset when it arrived on the scene in 2013, so we were interested to see what improvements make the newly introduced DC Pro X2 headset better. David Clark has long been known for producing quality headsets, and both models in the Pro series meet this standard. New in the DC Pro X2 ($795 list price) is automatic gain control for improved active noise reduction performance in high-noise environments, enhanced auto shut-off that virtually eliminates accidental battery-power drain and a slightly redesigned profile with an oblong-shaped dome that provides exceptional rest-on-ear stability. Retained in the DC Pro X2 is the 7.5-ounce weight and leatherette ear seals that are perfect for long flights. This headset provides excellent active noise reduction with…

Even the simplest instrument approach can present challenges to pilots who don’t plan ahead, but in this month’s chart, the ILS Runway 21 at Flagstaff Pulliam Airport, Arizona (FLG), pilots will encounter some issues unique to flying an approach into an airport with an elevation in excess of 7,000 feet—7,003 feet to be exact. This procedure demands careful consideration of aircraft performance limitations, especially in warmer months when density altitudes can climb toward the stratosphere. In winter, higher altitudes add the risk of icing. A. INTERCEPT ALTITUDES Because Flagstaff is located some 130 miles northeast of Phoenix, from which it derives some of its approach-control services, radar following may or may not be available depending upon the time of the day. This translates into pilots needing to be ready to…

Continued VFR into IMC is the scourge of general aviation. Year after year, it is a leading cause of fatal accidents—almost four times deadlier than encounters with thunderstorms and icing combined. If anything, these numbers underestimate the problem, since many “successful” VFR-into-IMC flights never show up in the National Transportation Safety Board statistics, but instead only in the lucky pilots’ nightmares. Safety advocates have been focused on this problem for more than 60 years, including a well-known study from the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association and the University of Illinois that determined the average VFR pilot had “178 seconds to live” upon entering instrument meteorological conditions. Since then, there have been changes in training, technology and regulations. And yet such accidents persist. Why? Risk Factors There is no easy solution,…

Long before I became a pilot, I read something somewhere about the extreme dangers of shock cooling a piston aircraft engine. The article didn’t specify which engines. It tossed a large, wet blanket over every Lycoming and Continental ever made. The idea of cylinders cracking on a steep descent with all that cold air passing over them captured my imagination. It wasn’t until years later that the myth was finally debunked. Think of how many thousands of times a student pilot chops the power in a trainer and comes down at idle for a simulated engine out. That’s not to say shock cooling isn’t an issue for some engines, but it isn’t for the vast majority of the aircraft we fly. What began as a precautionary procedure for a small…

Aware that this column will have new developments by the time it goes to print, I hesitated to write about the subject. But I felt passionate enough that it would be a disservice to readers if this particular airline guy didn’t weigh in, especially for someone that spent an entire jet career flying Boeing products. As a recap, Indonesia’s Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, both operating the new-generation Boeing 737 Max 8, crashed within five months of each other under similar circumstances involving what appears to be an erroneous activation of an automated anti-stall system called MCAS (maneuvering characteristics augmentation system). What is MCAS exactly? Some background information helps with the explanation. The Max is another stretched version of the 1960’s designed 737 fuselage but with…