It sounds like they’re planning to produce new aircraft with the turboprop engines, not just re-engine existing ones. I have to wonder if there’s really enough of a market to justify the cost.
Good luck to them.
Yeah, Catalinas are cool!
Not some hyperbolic headline based on the pictures. Holy crap.
Anybody can screw up on any given day. And sometimes, there’s no screw-up involved; it just ain’t your day.
But drying through a hail shaft is a really bad thing to do. I wonder how it was they ended up doing that rather than going around.
Can the cockpit people see a hail shaft? Or see it on radar?
How sure of a thing is it pilots can “see” it well enough to fly around it?
Hail is normally associated with a thunderstorm which is one of the easier things to see on radar. That said, a single thunderstorm is easy to avoid but a line of them can cause problems and as the radar often can’t penetrate beyond the immediate line of weather you can find yourself heading up blind alleys even with the best of intentions.
Reminds me of this one:
Rain attenuation of the X-band radar made them think they had a hole they could thread the needle through, when in fact they were heading for the worst of it.
With modern radar and the antenna sizes on big jets a close storm shielding a farther one is pretty rare bordering on unheard of nowadays. Barring malfunction of course. The radars I started with on the 727 where not much different from Southern Airways, and yes, there were lots of ways for it to fool you or you to fool yourself. The same is true of the modern lower-powered radars on bizjets or or private corporate turboprops. Much less capability to discriminate and to penetrate.
Thunderstorms are obvious on radar. Rain and heavy rain are also obvious on radar. Hail in free air is almost invisible on radar, especially at high altitude where it’s frozen solid. Down low, where the air is warm enough that the outer layer of at least some of the hailstones has become wet, it becomes more reflective, but not nearly as much as pure rain is for the same volume of water.
Said another way, what appears to be light rain could in fact be heavy hail. That’s where evaluating the totality of clues comes in. Both radar, visual, and synoptic-scale weather patterns. If you can gather them. One look at the storm or storm-system from 30 or 40 miles away in clear air is tremendously informative. Often they’re wrapped in enough fuzz & cirrostratus that you never get a good visual on them.
Hail can be ejected out the top or sides of a significant thunderstorm and be falling miles away from the obvious visible cloud. Rare, but it occurs. Mostly if you stay out of the radar return and stay out from under the anvil or “blow-off” as we call it, you’ll be fine. But that’s not always practical.
Yesterday we went 100 miles out of our way to avoid driving through what was probably benign but extensive blow-off. Probably. This morning traffic volume and the info from a steady stream of folks just ahead had all of us driving through stuff that looked worse on radar than what I went around yesterday. It varies.
There’s also a big difference between a mature midwestern afternoon thunderstorm and the towering cumulus rain clouds we get in the tropics shortly after sunrise. By late afternoon the tropical ones can kick your butt. At 9am? Usually not so much. Usually.
Bottom line: there’s a lot of judgment and experience to evaluating what’s safe and what isn’t. Were those guys semi-asleep at the switch or were they ambushed by circumstances? We don’t know yet.
I found this interesting:
Times have changed. A simple iPad would have save that flight today. It would have shown how bad the weather was they were trying to penetrate (with a 15 minute delay) and guided them to the nearest airport runway +/- a few feet when the engines failed.
Recent test flight of Wisk eVTOL:
Looks close to being able to “turn on a dime”.
I hope this is non-paywalled. It displayed OK for me without being logged in.
It’s a discussion about a presentation at Oshkosh this week about the phase-out of 100LL fuels.
Ref @PastTense above, here’s another e-vtol first that I don’t think is paywalled:
Heck, I was there and missed it. I saw their display on the field but I didn’t know they were flying it. I was hoping to see the Constellation arrive but it landed after I left.
And the reason they are having this discussion now instead of the last century like automobiles is?
It has been discussed since the 70s. It just… takes a while.
A brand new Cessna 172 comes with a Lycoming IO-360-L2A engine. Which was first made in 1952 (fuel injection was added in 1963). It still runs on leaded avgas.
Car engines were improved to run on unleaded. That basically hasn’t happened in general aviation. So instead, a new fuel with all the properties of the old was needed. And that’s a pretty high-tech thing, only available fairly recently.
We could have had unleaded aviation engines decades ago if there was enough money in general aviation to pay for the development and certification of a new engine (as well as the training of mechanics, etc.). But there isn’t, so most craft are stuck with engines designed in the 50s.
There’s a legal issue behind it. If aircraft are designed for leaded gas and you use unleaded then it’s a lawsuit when it crashes while using unleaded. Congress would have to exempt fuel STC’d aircraft from lawsuits and mandate all aircraft get the STC.
Yeah. Mechanically almost all GA planes are your grandfather’s airplane and your dad’s antique airplane.
New fuel in old engines won’t fly. New engines are cost-prohibitive. Touch circle to square. So the can’s been kicked down the road forever.
Forever is finally arriving.
It’s very good for the local GA airport (Reid-Hillview, where I got my license) that this is finally coming together. There’s been a concerted push to close the airport over lead concerns. That hasn’t quite happened yet, but they did ban the sale of 100LL last year. The lack of fuel has already contributed to a crash.
I’m sure the anti-airport folk will switch to new tactics, but this gives RHV at least some breathing room. They’ll be one of a few airports getting the first shipments of G100UL.
I don’t think there’s an environment reason to eliminate100LL. Small planes don’t represent much of a hazard due to the number of planes flown per day. Av gas represents about .1 percent of gasoline consumed.