Suggested Banner: Gone, But Not Forgotten
Freakishly more like March instead of February, the flying
weather cooperated well for most of the last week. Some 40-mph winds Friday
scrubbed several flights, but otherwise we were blessed. Among the week's
visitors were a Mooney M20C, a Piper Archer or two, a UMC Skyhawk and Jay
McClintock's Piper Tomahawk from Harrisonville. Todd Proach of Harrisonville
flew in Saturday on an Angel Flight compassion trip in his Beech Bonanza A36.
The unadvertised Fliars Club fly-out on Saturday morning
netted only one participant, Jerimie Platt in his Grumman Tiger. Also out were
Eric Eastland in his Cessna Skyhawk, warming up the oil for changing, Jon
Laughlin in his Piper Cherokee 180C and Gerald Bauer in a Cessna 150. New pilot
Bob Plunket took a Cessna 150 out for lunch with a passenger at Lincoln on
Saturday.
Big changes have taken place since late-2021 on the Kansas
City sectional aeronautical chart. Several VOR stations have been removed,
deleting a whole network of Victor airways that has been around for decades.
The FAA had been threatening to eliminate these comforting, but expensive to
keep up, ground-based navaids, and over the last couple of years it's made good
on its warning. The Oswego VOR halfway to Tulsa is no more, as well as the
Maples VORTAC near Fort Leonard Wood, the Neosho VOR south of Joplin and the
Macon VOR south of Kirksville. The latter two locations retained their DME
functions, no doubt part of instrument approach procedures. The pared-down list
of Minimum Operational Network stations, like Butler and Springfield, remains
in place as a hedge against Red China shooting down our GPS satellites.
An embarrassing environmental survey taken at Superior,
Colorado last year has backfired on its promoters, who were certain the lead
additive in aviation gasoline at their airport was poisoning them. As we've
always said, the minuscule amount of lead used in flying is a non-problem, and
the testing at Superior found “undetectable” levels in all but one of the
sites, and that was an older home with some lead in its plumbing. So, the
earth-savers will have to find another way to close the town's airport.
Reader Stephanie Hotsenpiller-Poe
correctly answered last week's historical question, about which Wright Brother
was older and which one died first. In both cases, she said, it was Wilbur, who
died too young of typhoid in 1912. Our brain-teaser for next week is: What is
the meaning of EASA certification, advertised for some foreign airplanes being
imported into the U.S.? You can send your answers to [email protected].
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