What's Up
by LeRoy Cook
12-29-2025
Suggested Banner: The Emergency That Wasn’t
Even if you could find the airport in the dense fog, there
was no chance of flying on several socked-in mornings last week. The prevalent
one-quarter mile visibility and 100-foot ceiling extended over much of the
mid-section of the country. Butler was fortunate in that it usually cleared off
by mid-day, but Kansas City stayed below minimums most of Christmas day.
The unusually warm weather presaging this week’s cold
blast invited many aircraft to take wing. The advisory frequency was alive with
radio calls and we saw several Skyhawks and Warriors on the local runway.
Locally, Randy Miller and Lance Dirks had flights in the club’s Cessna Skyhawk
and Will Cook and I had it out as well, Jeremie Platt flew to Fliars Club
breakfast in his Grumman Tiger, I took the 1946 Aeronca Champ up and Jon
Laughlin flew in from Foster with his Piper Cherokee 180.
A few weeks ago there was much cheering and congratulating
over the first “save” recorded by a King Air turboprop equipped with Garmin’s
Autoland emergency self-landing system. Supposedly the crew passed out due to
pressurization failure at 23,000 feet and the Autoland came to life and took
over, landing the airplane autonomously at Denver’s Rocky Mountain Metro
airport. Last week, the truth came out; the pilots were on oxygen, not
incapacitated, and decided to let the system go ahead and play out after it
activated, rather than cancel it. There was no robotic save from certain death.
Last month’s 43-day government shutdown took a toll on the
FAA’s air traffic controller training academy, when 500 trainees quit because
they were not getting paid. The critical shortage of certified ATC
controllers can ill afford that loss of replacement trainees, according to FAA
Administrator Bryan Bedford, testifying before the Senate’s Aviation
Subcommittee week before last. Working controllers were not getting paychecks
during the shutdown either, so I guess going without is just part of the
training.
On the Thursday evening before Christmas, one of the Air
Force’s big C-17 cargo planes suffered a nosegear collapse during landing at
Charleston, SC’s International Airport, closing down the runway and diverting
traffic to the alternate strip. It took a while to get the big whale back on
its feet to reopen the pavement. No airfield damage was found from the impact.
Earlier this month, a Boeing 737 pilot for Mexican tour
carrier Magni Charters locked himself in the cockpit with a load of passengers
on board, waiting to go from Mexico City to Cancun. He was protesting because
he hadn’t been paid for five months and had been forced to buy his own
navigation charts. The police broke in and took him to jail; the flight left
late, hopefully with pilots who had been promised to be paid for the trip.
Our weekly question from last time concerned the
definition of the Armstrong Limit of altitude. It’s the height at which humans
cannot survive without a pressurized environment, about 63,000 feet, above
which their blood boils away without atmospheric pressure. For next week, what
are “decelerons?” Hint: found on B-2 Stealth bombers. You can send your answers
to [email protected].
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