Out and back
Lessons learned This was going to be the post about how I’d finished sandblasting my rusty pilot’s licence, completed my RA-Aus (Recreational Aviation Australia) endorsement checkride, and been cleared to fly solo pretty much whenever I wanted. (Which is pretty much all the time.) As it happens, that’s not quite how things turned out. Go? No go. Flight training has a frustrating capacity to teach … Continue reading Out and back
Tell the sky to rejoice
3, 2, 1, Breathe How long can you hold your breath? For 30 seconds…? A minute…? Actually, it’s longer than you think. For me, it was a little over 12 years. To be precise, it’s been 13 years since I flew anything with a throttle, and about 11-½ years since I flew a glider. After a while, the numbers don’t matter. Twelve years seems about … Continue reading Tell the sky to rejoice
Pioneer Trail
Augustus Moore Herring When I scan my mental list of ‘first flight’ claimants – or even powered flight pioneers – the name Augustus Herring is something of an unknown quantity. That’s a massive oversight, as even a quick read of Herring’s Wikipedia entry proves. Herring wasn’t just one of the USA’s most important aviation pioneers, he was arguably one of the key threads linking everyone else’s … Continue reading Pioneer Trail
Vital signs
Enjoying the country air You see. This is what I’m talking about… In the past two weeks I’ve been to two small, country air shows. And country shows are the best. The first was quite by accident. The small airfield at Aldinga (YADG), about 45 km from central Adelaide, had promoted an ‘Open Day’ that I wanted to go to. (You’ll see why in an … Continue reading Vital signs
Hard landing
Lessons from the lighter side Let me begin with a mea culpa: I admit, I only started watching the clip below for a bit of a laugh. Don’t get me wrong – I have profound respect for the skill, patience and resilience of the people who build and fly model planes. Especially the resilience: Hundreds of hours on the workbench; tens of seconds on the … Continue reading Hard landing
Gone awry
Oh dear. I think I might have gotten a bit ‘soap boxy’ last month. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m anti-enterprise, or anti-airlines, or anti- very much, really. Who has the time? I am, if anything, a little passionate about aviation and the freedom to practise it. And so I’m still committed to writing a follow-up article for ‘If you build it…’ … Continue reading Gone awry
If you build it…
The two at the front There was something curiously logical about a movie star who made his name riding horses lending a small wooden ship to a pair of corporate heavyweights, so they could change the course of aviation. The afternoon that Boeing’s Bill Allen and Pan American’s Juan Trippe spent cruising Puget Sound aboard John Wayne’s Wild Goose in 1965 has become part of … Continue reading If you build it…
Light as air
The art of science Apparently I’m not the only one to have noticed the photogenic beauty of wind tunnels and what goes on inside them. So it seems appropriate to celebrate the beautiful images that have been captured in wind tunnels over the decades. Now, this isn’t a study of wind tunnels or their history, or even of aerodynamics. It’s simply a collection – and … Continue reading Light as air
Private War
The Battle of Winslow Sobanski Any war is made up of a series of battles – for each particular country, region, city, hamlet, hill or strongpoint… and World War 2 was no exception. But alongside the thousands of strategic and tactical fights which made it into the history books, there were millions of private battles that didn’t. On land, sea, and in the air, every … Continue reading Private War
Go with the flow
The way to fly I’ve been reading aerodynamics books over the last month. I know. So cool, right? I don’t apologise. I find the subject fascinating and the more I learn, the more it makes me want to find out. I have it so bad that I find the engineers at NASA JPL and Langley genuinely cool. Sigh! I guess there are far lesser people … Continue reading Go with the flow
