St. Maarten airport. For those of you tired of dreary winter weather, Jon Ostrower takes a 5-day trip to beautiful (and sunny) St. Maarten in the Caribbean and has posted his best aviation related shots from the beach at the end of the local airport’s runway.
How to refuel a giant C-5 Galaxy. For military aviation buffs, aroundthepattern.com contains two detailed posts on how to refuel a C-5 – definitely a tricky maneuver to plan and execute!
Sully Sullenberger, the last of the real pilots? Meanwhile, John White of All Things Aviation asks whether pilots like Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger are really a dying breed. He notes that the instrumentation of the Airbus 320 is “projected on large LCD screens rather than through mechanical devices like artificial horizons and altimeters and all of that” leaving him to wonder if “the crop of pilots learning today don’t become too dependent upon the gizmos in the cockpit rather than the basics of flying.”
Turn off your cellphone. And finally on a more serious note, Flightglobal and several blogs are reporting that the USA’s FAA has issued an alert to airlines to remind pilots to turn of THEIR cell phones. It seems that an FAA air safety inspector riding along on an unnamed airline’s flight from the jump seat reported hearing a rather loud “warbling” sound that was also “detected” by both crewmembers (this was just prior to reaching V1). “It was later determined that the sound came from the first officer’s cellular phone, which had been left in the ON position,” according to the Safety Alerts For Operators (SAFO) note. So we remind any pilot readers of this blog: Turn off your cell phones before take-off!
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