Table of contents for October 2023 in Pilot

Well that’s what it feels like to me and possibly some others out there, after rotten weather has prevailed for so many months. Finally, though it has come good with enough fine days and calm evenings to enjoy things as diverse as flying aerobatics in Hurricane Heritage’s unique two-seater and retracing a country walk in my rather more pedestrian Cub at 500ft. I have also made time to get the Cub’s annual inspection and test flight done before the Permit to Fly validation expires, making summer 2023 unique in that respect. It used to be pretty much inconceivable that one might get to fly a Hawker Hurricane as anyone but one of a handful of private owners or an RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight pilot. Airworthy Hurricanes were few…

It seems to me that Brexit has been a damp squib so far. This government like its predecessors hasn’t exactly capitalised on those opportunities created by Brexit – I can’t think of an example of Brexit policy or an outcome that we can really celebrate. The government is hamstrung by its defensive approach designed to mitigate the perceived dangers of leaving the EU. It is awfully dull. The government has thought itself into a divergence trap in which the establishment is terrified to move away from European standards for fear of becoming a marginalised outlier, checking out but never quite leaving. Perhaps this is the right approach to food standards given that in 2022 the EU bought £13.7bn of UK’s total £24.9bn of food and drink exports, but in aviation,…

Zenair hits a nadir Aircraft Type: Zenair CH 750 Date & Time: 4 March 2023 at 1420 Commander’s Flying Experience: PPL, 721 hours (of which 5 were on type) Last 90 days: 11 hours Last 28 days: 6 hours The pilot of the CH750 had planned to fly from Tatenhill Airfield to Thruxton Airport. However, thirty minutes into the flight, he saw a red warning light illuminate on the instrument panel. Four red warning lights were fitted: two for the engine control unit (ECU), one to indicate overall health of the electrical system and one to indicate a low fuel state. The pilot did not recall which of the four warning lights illuminated, but soon afterwards the engine stopped. He immediately selected a field in which to land and, aware of his aircraft’s limited…

Testing setback for British eVTOL Vertical Aerospace has made no comment as to how damage sustained by its eVTOL prototype aircraft during a test flight on 9 August at Kemble might impact its certification timeline. Vertical had previously announced it was hoping to achieve type certification for the four-seater by the end of 2026. Thus far, the company has only acknowledged that the VX4 prototype was involved in ‘an incident’ during untethered, remotely piloted flight testing at Cotswold Airport in the UK and reported that no one was injured. Photos of the crashed VX4 circulating online show what appears to be significant damage to the starboard wing, as well as to one or more of the tilting rotors/propellers and electric motors, and part of the undercarriage. According to a source…

What a shoddy excuse for a summer! The lack of good weather invariably results in a deficit of flying, which inevitably produces a grumpy, ill-humoured Dave. Waspish with the wife, cantankerous with the kids – I even barked at the dog! My trusty Jodel D.9 Buzz has been especially neglected as the farm strip at which he’s based is orientated northwest-southeast, so even when it has been dry and sunny there’s been an unhelpful crosswind. Then at last there’s an evening with a congenial northwesterly, and I hurry up to the strip. I’ll gloss over the trials and tribulations of hand-propping a VW engine that hasn’t run for six weeks, but he eventually coughs into life and we’re soon rolling down the strip and into the sky. Now, where to…

Tried and tested – a superior ANR headset for sure Bose A30 ANR headset £1,269.95 A replacement for the A20 that was company’s flagship model (we understand stocks of the old model were withdrawn by the manufacturer on the launch of the new model) the new A30 is claimed by Bose to be ‘an entirely new product, designed to bring pilots the best combination of comfort, noise cancellation and audio clarity of any aviation headset on the market.’ Since our initial product description in the May edition, we’ve received a sample and been able to put it to test in the Editor’s Cub which, if nothing else, offers a suitably noisy cockpit environment for wearers. The new model retains the distinctive centre-pivot spring design of the A20, with which it…

Part of the instructor’s lot is the biennial review flight – the hour with an instructor that everyone must do to maintain their licence. There’s no formal content for this, an hour exploring something new – aerobatics or tailwheel training will suffice – despite the fact that you’ll not reach competency in such a short time frame. However, this will cost. And for the private owner why on earth should they pay to hire something when they’ve got their own? Consequently, I often find myself flying in a machine that the owner knows well and shouldn’t need ‘instruction’ on. However, it’s a good chance to revisit areas that people do not do practise regularly, and that’s always stalling, steep turns and forced landings. Why people don’t keep in regular practice…

Many years ago, I started power flying at Rand Airport in South Africa where the weather was perfect most of the time. The small club operating out of unused space in a hangar had two Piper Cubs, I think they were J2’s without radios. The Tower shone lights at you to control movements. They were a joy to fly and simple- the fuel gauge was a metal rod in the cap of the tank, just in front of the windscreen – the more metal you saw the more fuel you had. There were no flaps, and I don’t think there was any trim control in our models. I got as far as my first solo and remember the feeling of achievement. Some years later I continued my training at a…

THE PAN AM PRIZE! silentpooldistillers.com has joined Pilot to present our Star Letter writer the gloriously indulgent prize of a litre bottle each of Pan Am gin and vodka in a Pan Am building presentation box STAR LETTER An aerial paper round, anyone? I’m just back from my annual stay in Alderney and would like to say that one of the most popular things a pilot can do is to offer to take newspapers over especially if they are flying on a Sunday. Thanks to the wonderful management of the ‘local’ Alderney airline, Aurigny and its overthrow by the States of Guernsey, they no longer take papers onto the Island (since two years ago). The ageing population there loves a newspaper. I took 27 over last Sunday whilst carting my…

Our first visit to New York had to be a supernumary trip because of the North Atlantic Track (NATrack) procedures’ complexities and to witness the freneticism of New York’s ATC with its ‘alien’ American practices. The NATrack system was essentially a unidirectional, high-speed, eight-lane highway in the skies, westbound by day and eastbound by night. The coordinates were set daily, depending mostly on the atmospheric pressure patterns, to minimise flight times and fuel usage. This was before any acronyms like INS, IRS, GPS or the like, so navigation was by dead reckoning supplemented with Consol, Loran and sextant star or sun shots (and, later, Doppler drift and groundspeed indications). Separation back then was a tolerant 2,000 feet vertically, 120 nautical miles laterally and twenty minutes longitudinally. I and a colleague…