Bates County News

Monday, May 5, 2025

What's Up LeRoy Cook

 What's Up

by LeRoy Cook

 

5-5-2025

 

Suggested Banner: Nobody Hurt At Delta, Part Deux

 

The week's flying weather was once again spotty, until the weekend brought bright skies and lots of air traffic. Practice instrument approaches, concluding in missed-approach pullups, were prevalent, and work continued at Butler airport on both the lighting system upgrade and the fuel pump replacement. Hopefully, the two projects will be finished up together; we've had no gas here for six months.

 

I journeyed to Fort Scott airport to provide a checkout for a pilot taking an airplane to Wisconsin, and I stopped in at Harrisonville to visit with local flight instructor Delaney Rindal, who's been operating out of there while Butler is shut down. She participated in EAA Chapter 91's monthly open house at Lee's Summit airport on Saturday morning. Thankfully, her outside-stored airplanes escaped hail and wind damage from last week's storms passing over the area.

 

In aviation news of the week, it was announced that Dynon Avionics and Trig Avionics have merged; Dynon builds “glass” display instrument systems for general aviation planes, and as part of their installations they've used Trig's radios and intercoms, now brought in-house. On the airline side, an “almost merger” cooperative arrangement is taking place between JetBlue and United Airlines; they'll share some operating systems and facilities, but not ticketing. A proposed merger of JetBlue and  American Airlines in 2023 was blocked as anti-competitive.

 

The U.S. Navy's Harry S Truman supercarrier, operating as part of a task force in the Red Sea, has had a bad year. An F/A-18 Super Hornet airplane was being moved on the downstairs hangar deck when the ship maneuvered to evade incoming fire, and the $60 million plane and tow tractor were dumped out the door into the sea. One of the F/A-18's was lost to the Yemeni insurgents during a strike earlier, and the big boat has had a mild fender-bender with a merchant ship as well.

 

Delta Airlines’ bad luck just keeps coming, it seems like. We reported on various incidents at D/A last week, but now there was a report of a ceiling coming down during a Chicago to Atlanta DC-9 flight on April 14th, an embarrassing moment requiring passengers to hold up the plastic panel until somebody provided sturdy tape to keep it in place. It's only cosmetic, but shouldn't fall down. Delta offered 10,000 free miles to those helping.

 

The town of Stafford, Arizona is now waiving landing fees for aircraft under 12,500 pounds takeoff weight, which used to be $2 per thousand pounds, collected by a contractor harvesting data from landing aircraft's ADS-B reporting gear. Apparently, everybody was avoiding Stafford and it was generating an unwelcoming image, so the city fathers came to their senses after eight months of billing the toll.

 

The weekly brain-teaser question from last time wanted to know what U.S.-fought war started 75 year ago, whose aircraft are being featured at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh this summer. That would be the Korean War, officially a “police action” that we never really won. For next week, we want to know where the little two-seat Ercoupe airplane, first marketed in 1940, got its name. You can send your answers to [email protected].

 


Hedrick Cabinet's of Butler to Host Butler Honor Day

  Honor Day for the Butler High School is set for Thursday May 8 th . This year 92.1 has expanded to share this live coverage ...