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Listening to Gene Kranz talk about how he led the ground effort to bring the crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft and its crew safely home, I had one of those cross-connection moments where a fact on one side of my mind suddenly snaps some other fact into focus. One of the things Kranz did with his […]

We were all so excited! It had been 13 years since Tulsa had an airshow of its own and not only were we not having to drive to Oklahoma City or Fort Smith, but the show itself was shaping up to be a good one.Kyle Franklin and Matt Younkin were going to be on hand […]

Except it won’t be 11, it’ll probably be five minutes after you crawl out of the wreckage, if you’re so lucky. That seems to be the most compelling message from Tuesday’s noseover of a nice vintage Stearman at Washington’s Reagan Airport. In case you missed the story, a formation of Stearmans flew into DCA to […]

If nature abhors a vacuum, vacuums do, nonetheless, occasionally represent opportunity. And give Continental Motors credit for recognizing that and stepping in to push 94UL as the most realistic and practical replacement for 100LL. I’ll get to why Lycoming thinks that 94UL is the wrong way to go in a minute, but first a brief […]

Now that the knuckles are bandaged and we’ve all finished spitting teeth, can we get back to the task at hand, that being creating one of the greatest aviation spectacles in recent memory?You may have read about the spat between EAA and The Last Time, the group that has gathered more than 50 DC-3 owners […]

In researching on aircraft engines, I find myself pawing over documentation that often seems to lead to the iconic Rolls Royce Merlin. And what an icon it was. It emerged in 1933 and was improved continually until it was done in by post-war piston radials and eventually the jet engine. The Merlin delivered as much […]

The subhead on page 110 of 149 says it all: “General Aviation: High Equipage Costs With Little Benefit.” The FAA has made the rule on ADS-B out official. I don’t know what I was hoping for, but somehow I’m still disappointed.I’m not against the equipage to ADS-B. I’ll even agree with the FAA who said, […]

Here’s a quandary that may sound familiar. At my local airport, we have a pilot whom I’ll call Joe. Every other pilot on the field assumes he will end up in a smoking hole. Do you know the guy I’m talking about? This is the guy who takes no advice seriously; who believes he is […]

Survival or death can pivot on the smallest things. When I was kid, I grew up in the Texas panhandle where my Dad worked as a chemist in the oil patch. By the mid-1950s, the heyday of Panhandle oil production was over, but there was still a lot of drilling in the Canadian River basin.It […]

We’ve been following an incident earlier this week in which a Boeing 757 made an emergency landing at Dulles following a cockpit fire-a serious one, by the sounds of it. This incident raises some critical issues which I’ll address, but the over arching one is that if you have a serious cockpit fire, two things […]