There wasn’t much reason not to log some flying time last
week, after the severe weather moved out and more seasonable rain showers took
its place. Other than in the vicinity of those pop-up rains, we had some benign
opportunities to commit acts of aviation. If you could stand the spiraling cost
of fuel, that is. Despite the stabilized price of crude oil, pump prices never
go down as fast as they go up.
I’m always sarcastically amused when somebody says “if you
need to go flying, take me along and I’ll chip in for the gas.” First, I seldom
have a NEED to go flying (as opposed to a reason) and, second, fuel is only
about a third of the plane’s operating cost, maintenance and fixed expenses
making up the rest.
Visitors observed at the Butler
airport last week included a Piper Cherokee 180, a nice homebuilt Van’s RV-6A,
a yellow Piper Super Cub and the ubiquitous Cessna 172. Out of the local fleet,
Gerald Bauer took the club Skyhawk up, Steve Koehn flew the company Cessna 172,
and the SkyDive KC Cessna 182 was pressed into service to haul jumpers,
in the absence of the big Caravan 208B.
Nationally, about 2,000 Spirit
Airlines pilots are seeking other employment after their seniority and benefits
melted away in the company’s shutdown. They will have to be absorbed, at the
bottom of the ladder, by pilot-shortage slots left by retirees at other
airlines. That thwarts the plans for instant hiring by flight school graduates
just entering the workforce. Meanwhile, ex-Spirit crews have been given free
rides back home by other airlines and perhaps a free meal or layover cot by
their brethren.
The ancient B-52H bombers operated by the U.S. Air Force
are scheduled to be retrofitted with new engines (again), this time with
Rolls-Royce F130 fanjets replacing the Pratt & Whitney TF-33 motors, which
were state the art over the original straight turbojets. The old Buffs are
going to kept in service at least until 2050, an astounding 100 years after the
first B-52 came out of the Boeing plant. It’s just sad that we have to depend
on foreign engines for our military airplanes.
The airline newsmaker of the week was, of course, the
United 767 that clipped the cab of a semi on a roadway outside the Newark
airport on Monday. A light pole also got snapped off; thankfully, nobody got
hurt. The pilot got a little too low, faced with a short runway at Liberty
Airport at the end of a long day’s flying from Venice, Italy. One tire got
scuffed from the truck and a hole was poked in the fuselage by the pole.
A weirder event took place at Denver on Saturday when a
Frontier Airbus A321 hit a man on the runway during takeoff, who had evidently
scaled the airport fence with suicidal intent. The pilots were able to get
stopped successfully, despite a fiery compressor stall from the deceased
individual being sucked into an engine. A few injuries resulted from the rides
down the inflatable evacuation slides.
In 2022, a Boeing 737-800, operated by China Eastern
Airlines, crashed in southern China for unexplained reasons. Last week it was
announced that our National Transportation Safety Board has found evidence in
the airplane’s flight data recorder of both fuel cut-off switches being turned
off and control input to create a dive from 29,000 feet, showing deliberate
intent by one of the pilots. Previously, the close-mouthed Communist Chinese
government investigators, unwilling to disclose findings disparaging to the
state, had found nothing wrong in the wreckage where 132 people died. Now, the
horrible reason behind the crash has come out.
Our previous question wanted to know what kind of airplane
was used to spray Agent Orange defoliant in Vietnam? Mostly, they were
Fairchild C-123 Provider cargo planes. For next week, tell us when the first
pilot’s licenses were issued by the U.S. government. You can send your answer
to koc[email protected].
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