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…
Aviation culture If you’ve been following airscape for a while, you’ll know that January is hardly the most productive time of year. A combination of having kids home for the holidays and Adelaide’s furnace-fierce summer weather makes writing difficult, to say the least. Happily things are returning to normal now. And one way or another, I’m planning to make 2018 a pivotal year. For now, … Continue reading Firing up
Gold fever Even today, New Guinea is a hell of a place to commit aviation. The entire island (now bisected into Indonesian West Papua and Papua New Guinea) is literally bigger than Texas – by about 100,000 km2 – and steep mountains soar over 14,000 feet into the hot, equatorial air, creating a deadly home for the term ‘clouds with rocks in them’. Huge rivers … Continue reading On aviation’s frontier
Ernest K. Gann (1910 – 1991) Of course Ernest K. Gann should need no introduction to the aviation enthusiast ( – in every pilot, or the pilot in every enthusiast). But time marches on and knowledge falls off, so it’s worth making sure Fate Is The Hunter remains at the top of the ‘must read’ lists. For many years, tattered copies of Fate lived in … Continue reading More than love
If you’ve felt like airscape’s content has been a bit ‘samey’ lately, well, congratulations – you’re way ahead of me! Personally, I don’t think there’s been a shortage of interesting content, per se, but that’s probably helped lull me into some comfortable habits too. . . It’s high time I kicked myself where nobody should physically be able to kick themselves. New template, more stuff … Continue reading Re: Direction
Just recently, Editor Jeb Burnside published an article in the August 2016 issue Aviation Safety magazine that set me thinking. Here’s how it started: If you know a better way to teach and explain critical analysis of the dangers a proposed flight might pose, we’re all ears. Well, okay, seeing as you asked… But first, a little of the backstory. PAVE and I’M SAFE The article … Continue reading I’M SAFE
Feature image: US Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Mallory S. VanderSchans This is an article about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Kind of. And from a somewhat different angle… Oh, and I can’t promise you’ll like it. Rose coloured plexiglasses So have you made up your mind about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter yet? Because if you’re still sitting on the fence, I suspect you’re … Continue reading Rose coloured plexiglasses
Feature image © Thomas Kirn G-AHEM (cn 1978) ‘Balmoral II’, sister to our story’s aircraft G-AHEL ‘Bangor II’. It’s not widely known that BOAC, forerunner of British Airways, continued to fly global services throughout World War 2 – and by 1945 no airline had more experience crossing the Atlantic. At war’s end, the airline was swift to acquire five Lockheed C-69 transports, completed as L-49 Constellations, … Continue reading Constellation crossing
Feature photo (above) by Ron Kroetz | Flickr.com CC-BY-SD 2.0 The views of aircraft arrivals over (or should that be across?) Maho Beach, Sint Maarten are hardly a revelation anymore. Although they don’t get any less spectacular with time. What is news (for me at least) is this video, which details the arrival of a KLM 747-406M from the cockpit side of things… More … Continue reading Take a closer look
When it comes to hot arrivals, fighter types have the run and break. But when you fly without an engine, nothing comes close to gliding’s Competition Finish. The concept is straightforward (and slightly downward). Gliders have a known best glide angle, so there’s a reciprocal approach slope that rises out from the designated finish point. Once you intercept this slope you can forget about slow … Continue reading Wormburners 101
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