Aerospace Posts

With a week to reflect and sort the interactions and activities of EAA AirVenture 2021, my challenge was to quantify why it was the most enjoyable show of this millennium. The easiest quantifier was the people who attended. With few exceptions over …

Every color used in the construction of a parachute has a purpose. On some, it satisfies the owner’s aesthetic. For others, it is advertising. In the military, the color serves a specific requirement for visibility, or the lack of it. And then there…

A pandemic addiction to YouTube has delivered consistently interesting, entertaining, and educational interludes when its selection algorithm introduced me to Ward Carroll, a retired naval flight officer who spent most of his career as a radar inter…

The news has been full of stories about the successful test of the Space Launch System’s core of four RS-25 engines at Mississippi’s Stennis Space Center on March 18. But the more I read, the more the tacit central theme of the project seems to be…

As a word merchant, dictionaries are my favorite books whether they are online or old school paper, and not because I am a less than stellar speller. The most fascinating are historical dictionaries, like the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), that tr…

Photography is an activity pursued by many interested in aviation. For photographers who started before the digital age, storing slides, negatives, and prints was not only an out of space problem but also spacious signal that might suggest a hoardin…

Among the six naval aviators recommended for command of an aircraft carrier was Captain Amy Bauernschmidt, a 1994 Naval Academy grad and helo pilot who ticked an essential box on the carrier command checklist when she was the first female to serve a…

Living with an editor’s mindset is no easy thing, especially when faced with inconsistent “facts” in stories presented by different sources on a common topic. In this case it was the death of Chuck Yeager. Publicity throughout his life has made much…

Rarely are the dots so closely connected to an epiphany that turns a train of thought on the future of automated aviation in the opposite direction. SkyDrive The first dot was an August 29 New York Times story, Humans Take a Step Closer to “Flying C…

NASA As it did when Alan Shepard kicked off the US Space program with his suborbital flight in 1961, I eagerly anticipated watching the program’s most recent chapter, the resumption of flights launched from American soil. Watching the preparations f…

As most of us are coping with the geographic constraints of staying at home, one hopes the FAA did not schedule the release of the NRPM proposing Noise Certification of Supersonic Airplanes [FAA-2020-0316] for March 30, 2020 as an Easter egg or avia…

Wandering through Netflix’s streaming options hoping to trip over something that would hold my attention, in the Hidden Gems category I saw Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo. Having visited the recently restored facility (See 87 Steps to …

During the interviews for a story on avionics interfaces, one source made a passing reference to interface failure of the Boeing 737 Max MCAS (Maneuver Characteristics Augmentation System). The significance of this observation did not resonate until…

To be honest, my interest in extraterrestrial explorations waned with the establishment of the International Space Station. Sometimes I felt guilty about this, usually when I watched the luminous dot race across the night sky (forewarned by an Astro…

Aviation danger zones exist in all phases of flight, and they most often catch people on the ground, especially when another task attenuates their situational awareness. Almost walking into a stationary prop protruding from the Innovation Showcase b…

To the aviation minded, interest in World War I stops at the aerodrome because that’s where aeronautics’ voice changed as its technology matured. But interest in the conflict in which it fought—the War to End All Wars—never captured the interest of …

Acclimated to the excess of US Government agencies, learning that NASA made just enough Saturn V rockets to launch each of the scheduled Apollo missions was a surprise. If that was so, how did the Rocket Park at Houston’s Johnson Space center have t…

It’s tempting to forge a synonymous connection between flying cars and urban air mobility (UAM). That would be unfair because, for a number of reasons, the latter has a viable future where entrepreneurs have unsuccessfully been developing, promoting…

Journey to Mission Control Enriches Memories of Apollo 11 A half century ago, I was one of the millions worldwide who watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounce and bound across the surface of the moon. But I didn’t fully appreciate their accompl…

It’s been so long that I don’t remember when I started reading the FAA Aerospace Forecast, but I anticipate each update with eager curiosity, and the FAA just released its crystal ball for Fiscal Years 2019-2039. What interests me most are the gener…

For many, Florida’s Sun & Fun fly-in announces the commencement of flying season in every new year. A better transition from one flying year to the next is the National Aeronautic Association’s springtime announcement of the previous year’s most mem…

Anyone who has investigated becoming a pilot knows that aviation is sold by the flight hour. Anyone who’s ever rented one should find this interesting: the Fiscal Year 2019 Department of Defense Fixed-Wing and Helicopter Reimbursement Rates for the …

Waggism, playful lightheartedness, is the last thing one would expect to see at a facility dedicated to the deadly serious business of building FAA-certificated aircraft. But then I met Sally, her name printed on an aluminum placard in red Sharpie o…

By Micah Engber Al Bean. I just liked saying the name when I was a kid. It was a cool name, sounded like he would be a cool guy, what a neat name for an astronaut, for the fourth person to ever set foot on the moon. If it weren’t for that cool name…