Plane & Pilot

Today, flight training is fairly predictable, at least on the surface. This is thanks to an FAA and instructors and educators who worked with the agency over the past couple of decades to drag best practices into the modern world. This resulted in numerous updates to the standards pilots are held to on check rides, what used to be called the Practical Test Standards (PTS) but now are known as the ACS, for aviator “Certification Standards.” The intent was to take what was often, in practice, a completely subjective, and therefore unpredictable, set of standards and make them crystal clear. The change was immense, though it is often given short shrift. Following the adoption by the FAA of the PTS and, later, the ACS, instructors had a virtual airway chart…

Boeing delivered its final 747 jumbo jet amidst much pomp and circumstance, and rightly so. The 747 was an aircraft that changed aviation for the better, ushering in an era of previously unattainable travel opportunities for air voyagers worldwide. It was just what the 747 was, though that was a lot. It’s for what it wrought, as well. A few things about the plane, nicknamed by some brilliant PR person “The Queen of the Skies.” The 747 made its first flight in February of 1969, a fitting coda to the Summer of Love two years earlier, and was first delivered the following January to Pan Am, which eventually bought 65 of the jumbo jets out of the 1,574 produced over the years. The first 747, the -100 model, was around…

A UK nonprofit is developing an all-electric version of the popular Zenith CH-750 for use as medical transport for personnel to use in hard-to-reach places. The organization, which goes by the unlikely acronym of NUNCATS and even less likely name of “No Unnecessary Novelty Community Air Transport,” says that the goal is to provide clean air transport to help the estimated 1 billion people worldwide with no access to health care. NUNCATs has modified the plane, normally an LSA powered by a Rotax four-cycle internal combustion aircraft engine, into an electric personal transport. While not perfect, the idea does have a lot going for it, some of which isn’t talked about much when the subject of electric aircraft comes up. While the environmental impact of a handful of LSAs is…

Continental Aerospace Technologies has shared details behind a story that Plane & Pilot broke recently. The Mobile, Alabama-based engine maker has issued a mandatory service bulletin on thousands of its late-model engines, citing concerns that the snap rings on the crankshaft counterweights on six-cylinder engines, including 360-, 470-, 520- and 550-series engines, might have been improperly seated and could fail. The rings essentially keep the counterweight in place as it helps balance the vibration of the engines, and if one were to fail, the engine could fail catastrophically. The service bulletin requires that planes outfitted with the target serial-numbered engines that have fewer than 200 flight hours be flown no more than five additional hours in order to bring the plane to a service center. For some reason that the…

In February, observers spotted an unrecognized, giant balloon drifting along westward, as things tend to drift, across the North American continent. The balloon was the size, we’ve been told, of three school buses, which is a bit of an odd analogy. After it drifted over the Atlantic off the coast of the Carolinas, an F-22 Raptor shot it down. The Air Force has recovered much of the debris. Then, over the next week or so, three more objects were shot down, one in or around the Canadian border, so it was a joint exercise, the shooting down of this thing that they either don’t know what it was or they’re not saying. And there was one more off the frozen north coast of Alaska, too, that got shot down and…

Piper PA-25-235 Pawnee Jacksonville, Florida / Injuries: 1 Fatal The flight was climbing out after picking up a banner. A security camera video showed the airplane climbing with the banner trailing behind before it disappeared from the camera’s view. Shortly after, witnesses observed the banner free falling to the ground and the airplane in a right spin before it impacted a parking lot in a nose-down attitude. Postaccident examination revealed no malfunctions or abnormalities that would have precluded normal operation of the airplane. The levels of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, also known as marijuana) and the Tetrahydrocannabinol Carboxylic Acid (THC metabolite) detected in the pilot’s blood during toxicological testing indicated that he had recently used THC. Although the investigation could not determine precisely when the pilot had last used THC, the levels…