Reader Mail

Going to the Moon Was Easy Compared To 100UL Car engines routinely have compression ratios (CR) of 10:1 or higher and run fine on mogas. In significant part, it’s because of far-better engine management systems (EMS) which are totally lacking on traditional aircraft engines. But fundamentally, it’s possible only because their small cylinder volume automatically […]

Report Calls For Multi-Pathway Approach To Mitigating Aviation Lead As a former FBO operator, airport manager, current E series powered Bonanza owner, A&P, drag racer, biker, and lover of all kinds of high-performance vehicles, myths die hard. Local dirt track racers would come over to the airport on Friday and Saturday night to buy 5 […]

Winter Flying? Really, Must We? Winter flying has its challenges, but so does summer flying. Given a choice between being too hot or too cold, I find it easier to build a fire than an ice cube. And I can always put on more clothing, but I can only take off so much. One of […]

FAA Announces New Drone Regs I think the general aviation community needs to drop their paranoia of drones and push back against overarching FAA regulations such as this. This regulation as written will prove to be extremely damaging to the traditional hobbyist model aircraft industry. This will have a very real impact on full-scale aviation […]

Hybrid-Electric Utility Aircraft Gathers Support People have to stop thinking about electric and hybrid electric propulsion as an evolution of piston, turbine, or jet propulsion. Our current crop of aircraft are designed around the operating characteristics of piston or turbine powerplants, including their fuel, combustion air, cooling, operating speed, maintenance, fire protection, and other requirements. […]

SpaceX’s Joyous Blowing Up of Rockets While Mars does seem much further away than 2024, I think it’s often overlooked how powerful Musk’s vision for reshaping the near-Earth infrastructure is. A fully *rapidly* reusable launch system, truly land-load-and-go like an airliner, could legitimately reshape how humans live on (and near) Earth. Who needs Mars when […]

Starship Completes High-Altitude Test Flight, Explodes During Landing People just don’t seem to understand how SpaceX has changed the space industry. Almost all our early space work was done by traditional aircraft companies like Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas. Obviously, when it came time to set up a test program, the people involved with aircraft testing would […]

SpaceX To (Maybe) Send Starship To 50,000 Feet Love him or hate him, Musk has revolutionized the space launch industry. And, he has done it in full view of the general public, failures and all. Things are about to get even more interesting. A new launch complex is under construction at the Kennedy Space Center […]

Remembering The XB-70 I was lucky enough to have Al White as a good friend. He was the only survivor of the mid-air collision between the F-104 and the XB-70. Al was seriously injured, copilot Carl Cross did not get out of the airplane as it went through extreme gyrations after losing most of its […]

Got My Flying Car So Don’t Need No Stinkin’ BFR If Teslas won’t fly on Mars I also refuse to go. And thanks Paul for the reference to AC 90-66B as I too responded “really?” in falsetto to 1000 ft traffic patterns for piston aircraft. All my “BFRs” (didn’t know that is “old-speak” till you […]