That CA-HI gap is a doozie.
Not without landing for more fuel. Twice. Which would take too long for the crew. So now they’re stranded in Fairbanks or Adak or wherever.
Tell that to Sikorski. The first flight from Hawaii landed on fumes. They came within minutes of making it a submarine route.
OK, I was thinking of the cargo flights through PANC. I guess they’re using the stop as a sort hub.
It’s not hard to fly DFW-Anchorage-Tokyo if you planned it that way and had a rested crew waiting in Anchorage to fly the second leg.
But it wasn’t planned that way, there was no waiting rested crew, and so couldn’t be executed that way.
For a bit of aviation trivia:
The next time you land at Savannah/Hilton Head airport on runway 10/28 say hello to Richard and Catherine Dotson. Their grave stones are part of the runway between taxiway E1 and A.
Curious if anyone went to Sun 'N Fun this year? Spent all of last week there, my first trip to the airshow. Also, my first time flying into one of the big shows via private plane.
There are upthread comments on the intensity level when arriving at big airshows, but I was still taken aback by the rapid-fire instructions. Note: I wasn’t flying, just a right-seat passenger. As we got close, ATC canceled IFR for us, passed us off, and we made an entire approach, landing, and taxi without transmitting. We just flew to a temporary approach fix (literally named “Middle Of Nowhere”), lined up and followed everyone else. The only 2-way interaction was ATC calling “Bonanza over smokestacks, rock your wings”. Later we were cleared to land on painted spot halfway down a taxiway and followed a marshal (on a motorcycle no less) to our parking spot. Never keyed the mic for any of this.
It was an amazing week though. Almost constant airshows and demos, along with “camping” under your airplane with a cooler and lawn chairs. Got an early Father’s day gift from my son while there. Pics below:
Pilot treated me to some fun maneuvers (Chandelles, etc.). He opined that we were probably the only two people in the world who were aloft in a Dauntless.
And got to see the closing night’s show (night time aerobatics with faux flame from the wings, combined with fireworks, music, explosions, all while a drone show depicted a F16 doing aileron rolls above it all). Did my best to capture it all with a phone camera.
It was fantastic and I can’t wait for next year.
I’ve flown into Sun n Fun twice and I think it’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done in an airplane. To put that in perspective, I’ve got several thousand hours instructing and the same in jet operations. I have tail wheel and acro time and even some warbirds. But Sun n Fun made me very nervous.
As you said, it’s very rapid fire. They are unusual procedures: one-way radio comm and lots of visual checkpoints, people landing on three parts of the same runway. It’s a beehive. And it’s also a lot of pilots of varying experience, many of whom fly very little. Scary.
I was in a 182 that flew to Oshkosh (I was in the back seat) On the way back I was in the right front seat. After take off PIC let me take controls. I can say I was at the controls of a plane inside (or perhaps just outside) OSH airspace during Airventure. I had controls from there until 5 miles from Viroqua (Y51)
Brian
Been there many times but not recently. One of the things that I remember was a group of people who came out at night with real WW-II Search lights. I got to play with one. They even had a Bat Man overlay to project on the clouds.
One of my trips was in a twin and it was barely staying aloft while in approach line to land. Someone pulled up from below between us and the plane in front. Good times ensued.
I found that Lockheed bush plane I was searching for. Lockheed AL-60.. The video may be the exact plane I saw years ago that the owner sold and repurchased and painted as a school bus.
Interesting history. Al Mooney of the original Mooney Aircraft company had left and gone to work for Lockheed. He designed this plane but Lockheed didn’t think they could make it cheaply enough in the US so they licensed it out to other countries.
Cool find. Thank you. I had never heard of the AL-60.
Just gonna leave this one here (read the red boxes and enjoy the pictures).
Always ensure your penguins are secured.
They should have known better - after all, it is a flightless bird. It just did what was necessary to maintain its status.
That is the giveaway, eh? Seems like bad luck to get into a flying machine with a flightless bird. I don’t know what penguins did to be cursed like that and I don’t want to press the issue.
I’ve carried takehē in the hold before. It went ok!
They were thought to be extinct in the late 1800s but were rediscovered about 50 years later.
Since this has become the aviation (with natural born aviators aboard) thread -
Woman can’t fly HOME with her parrot after flying with it to PR
I liked the statement that “The helicopter rolled to the right and the pilot could not recovery timeously.”
Timeously? Now that is a cool word. If it wasn’t English a couple weeks ago, it is now. So much better than “… in a timely fashion.” The lawyers like to use a bare “timely”: “The writ was filed timely”, etc.
As I was reading along I was totally expecting the penguin to get out of the box and go apeshit, to use technical terms. Resulting in a mad fight to subdue the enraged or panicked penguin while not losing control of the helo.
I will say the box getting loose happened at just about the ideal time. 30 seconds later and this would have been a three-fatality event. And a very mysterious one to investigate. Cardboard boxes tend to sorta fall apart after a few hours in seawater. Especially with a maybe not dead but very unhappy penguin stuck inside.
More seriously …
Loose cargo has caused a LOT of mishaps over the years. As has the occasional unbelted passenger or crewmember.
This reminds me of a mishap that almost happened in USAF that was used in the curriculum as a teaching moment. T-38 with instructor pilot in front seat and flight surgeon in the back seat. Those docs are not pilots, but do get to / have to fly so many sorties per quarter to retain their qual (and pay). And keep them tuned in on the rigors their patients face. So sorta amateur airplane steerers with some rudimentary amount of flying and aircraft-specific training.
Anyhow, they’re zooming along, the IP is flying and suddenly the stick displaces some to the right, the airplane rolls right, and the IP can’t re-center the stick. Then suddenly the stick is free, the IP corrects back to level flight, and all is well. Not a huge scary maneuver but scary for what it suggests about the flight control system. In that airplane it’s about as simple as an early 1960s hydraulic-boosted system can be.
They get into a discussion about all this and are on the way to convincing themselves to make a controlled bailout rather than risk losing control down near the ground.
The doc has an aha moment. Just before this happened, he had reached down to the floor under his left knee to pick up a dropped pen. They tried it again, and sure enough, his helmeted head just brushed against the stick down low, pushing it right. The doc never felt the contact, but the airplane sure did.
Moral of the story: make sure only one person is touching the controls, and be real cautious when moving around the controls you shouldn’t be touching. And potentially fatal, or at least airplane-destroying, mistakes can be made when the cockpit(s) are configured fore-aft and you can’t see what the other is doing; only talk about it.
Two planes bump wingtips at DC’s Reagan today; no injuries to those aboard, which included six NJ/NY Congresscriters
Helicopter down in the Hudson River. Not looking good at all: