Some of my flying blogging buddies are running a series of posts about pilot gifts. For example, Vincent wrote about his wish for a Cirrus SR-22 and Max Trescott recommended the movie FlyAbout (which I also enjoyed very much). Well, I’ve been nice and not at all naughty this year and I hope Santa will bring me a Breitling Navitimer. I like it because it looks really technical and you can use the bezel as a kind of whizzwheel calculator to do time, speed and fuel consumption calculations. The design dates back to 1952 and it was originally designed with aviators in mind.
Search Results for: christmas
Pilot catches a thief while doing a fly-by of his house
ABC News has reported an odd story about how pilot David Zehntner was doing a flyby of his home in a Cessna 182 Skylane and caught a thief in the act. David has a vacation home in Franklin (North Carolina) and a main residence in LaBelle (Florida) that’s under the approach pattern for the nearby airport. For that reason, David always makes a low altitude pass over his home on his flying trips.
However and on his flight returning from Christmas vacation, David noticed a truck in the driveway. When he dropped down to 300 feet, he saw a guy walking around and looking into all of the windows and testing the doors of his home to see if he could get in.
On the fourth pass, the thief looked directly at the aircraft, but he still attached David’s utility trailer to his hitch and took off with it. David’s wife suggested landing on the road, but the aircraft had three hours of fuel left. So instead, David tried but failed to get in contact with the local airport while his wife tried calling the police on her cell (it was to noisy to talk) – all while following the thief in the Cessna.
The thief even stopped at a red light at a police station, but David had no way of alerting the police to the situation. When he saw the thief turn onto highway 80, David landed at the nearby airport and called the police who caught up with the thief.
Fifty-nine year old Gary Robert Haines was arrested, charged with grand theft and released on $2,500 bond (no doubt before the paperwork could be processed according to one sarcastic comment on the article…). Police also found several loaded rifles and a handgun in the vehicle (which they are investigating) while David got his trailer back.
How to make the ultimate paper airplane (the Top Gear way)
Top Gear’s James May was recently asked by Radio Times to demonstrate how he had made paper airplanes when he was a kid – something he used to spend hours a day doing (with some help from his father). According to James, the paper airplane he has developed is:
…sort of cross between a Vulcan bomber and a Fairey Delta, and if you do it properly, it’s a good flyer.
In addition, James told Radio Times that he had:
…spent hours making gliders with different wing shapes and that’s how I learnt the basics of aerodynamics. If you do things like that, it’s quite easy to grasp the fundamentals and you can easily start designing little aeroplanes of your own.
Today, James flies his own light aircraft, but he is still experimenting with both paper airplanes and balsa wood aircraft. In fact and for the Christmas 2012 edition of Toy Stories, James supervised a project to build a model balsa-wood glider and fly it the 22 miles across the English Channel to France.
I don’t yet see that episode posted on YouTube, but Radio Times has a short video where James demonstrates his technique for making paper airplanes:
In addition, here is a graphic that shows James’s method for making the ultimate paper plane (a full-size version can be downloaded here):
What’s the best Santa tracker, Google Maps or Microsoft’s Bing Maps?
Last week the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which has tracked Santa since 1955, announced its new Internet Santa service and they replaced Google Maps with Microsoft’s Bing Maps. NORAD had been using Google Maps since 2007 and offers three different Smartphone apps to track Santa through Bing maps available on the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 8 smartphones.
According to ABC news, NORAD’s Tracks Santa app has been downloaded nearly 922,000 times through Apple’s iTunes plus nearly 558,000 times for Android users and 2,500 times for Windows Phone 8 users from December 12 to December 18 or so. As for website visitors, 29% of the website visitors are from the UK, 7% are from Canada and 5% are from Japan. In addition, NORAD’s Tracks Santa has a Twitter following of around 95,000, a Facebook page with over a million likes, over 4,000 Google+ subscribers and a YouTube video with over 1 million views as well.
However, Google is still in the business of tracking Santa using its Google Earth and Google Maps products along with a new algorithm for its Santa Tracker. The Google blog reports that you will be able to use Google Maps and Google Earth starting around 2:00 am PST Christmas Eve to keep track of Santa.
Perhaps fortunately, there appears to be no Santa tracking service using Apple Maps and let us hope Santa himself has chosen a more reliable mapping service to avoid getting lost on Christmas Eve!
With that in mind, which Santa tracker do you think is the best to use (or the the more accurate one!), NORAD’s based on Microsoft’s Bing Maps or the Google offering?
GA flight from Sydney to London on a fuel made from plastics
Few pilots are probably also readers of Plastics & Rubber Weekly or BusinessGreen but both publications have articles about Pilot Jeremy Rowsell who intends to fly from Sydney to London in a Cessna 182 powered from a fuel made out of plastic waste. Specifically, Jeremy’s “On Wings of Waste” project will attempt to break two records:
- To be the first to fly via plastic waste fuel at 100% treatment.
- To break a flight time from Sydney to London for a single engine piston plane.
To break those records, Jeremy will use a fuel produced by Ireland based Cynar PLC – company that is developing and has a patent applied for a technology to convert a wide range of end of life plastics (ELP) into liquid fuels. The plastic-derived fuel has already been tested in cars but Jeremy’s flight will be the first real-life trial in an aircraft.
However, Cynar chief executive Michael Murray has stated that the fuel needs more testing and trials but it should be just fine in a diesel engine not going beyond 8,000 feet. Jeremy will also be needing 400 litres to complete the London to Sydney flight with that amount of fuel requiring around five tonnes of plastic waste to produce. Hence and if large quantities of plastic waste can be secured, plastic based fuel could become a green fuel alterative for small general aviation aircraft but there is no mention of costs in either article and whether plastic based fuel will be competitive with more traditional fuels.
As for the flight itself which is scheduled for autumn (and more likily for November), Jeremy plans to stop along the 10,000-mile route at Darwin, Christmas Island, Sri Lanka, Oman, Jordan and Malta. He will also be cruising at 5,000 feet for stretches of up to 13 hours before reaching London six days later.
On-board the delivery flight for a new British Airways 777
I love visiting aircraft factories and this is why, when British Airways invited me to fly to Seattle and witness the delivery of a new 777-300ER airliner, I jumped at the chance. I fly a lot, both as a pilot and a passenger, and I really wanted to see how Boeing built them and what a new plane actually felt like.
I flew out with a few other invited guests (full disclosure: BA paid for my trip. Thanks, guys!) a couple of days before the delivery. This gave me the chance to visit the Concorde Lounge at Heathrow Terminal 5. Normally reserved for the elite of the elite frequent flyers, this isn’t your regular lounge. Waitress service, food at your seat or in a private dining room, vintage Bollinger on tap, private cabanas for a nap or shower – it’s more like a deluxe resort hotel.
We spent a day visiting the Museum of Flight and an afternoon in Seattle. It’s a fantastic museum for avianerds like me. Lots of planes to look at, inside and out, plus a a tour round an ex-Air Force One and a B-29 wrapped in plastic like a billionaire kid’s Christmas present.
In the evening we had dinner with the BA team who were taking delivery of the aircraft – engineers, pilots, crew and, of course, finance people to handle the multi-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars transaction. And, no, they wouldn’t tell me how much the paid for the plane but they did let me hold the receipt!
We had a ground floor tour of the factory. It is the biggest building in the world and it’s amazing to see plane parts being moved around like they were were oranges in a basket. And the 747-8 and 777 production lines were very impressive with six aircraft at various stages. We also saw the 787 line but, at Boeing’s request, nobody took pictures.
Then, a massive birthday surprise, they invited me to cut the ribbon.
The plane was due to fly us back to Cardiff where it would undergo final checks and have the rest of its seats installed but it wasn’t like a regular flight. For one thing, there were only 20 or 30 people on board and so the captain could do a full power take off. I’ve only ever had this experience three times before, twice on Concorde where you can feel the power being applied, and once on a 767 departing out of John Wayne Airport. Basically, it’s a full throttle, maximum acceleration, maximum rate of climb departure and it *was* quick.
One of the Boeing staff filmed it:
Another big difference was the interior. The plane only had premium economy and economy seats so the First and Club World cabins were completely empty. It was very weird – everyone had this big grin on their face. I won’t say that we played football in there on the flight back but nobody can prove that we didn’t.
We also got to see the crew rest area, which is more like a submarine that anything else but I think it must be more comfortable than sitting in a chair for the whole flight.
The highlight of the flight back was the view of the Northern Lights over Greenland. I’ve never seen them before and it was an awesome experience in the true sense of the word. Unfortunately, my camera didn’t do a good job with it so all I can show you is the passengers all craning for a better view.
To cap the trip off, when we arrived at Cardiff, we had a tour of the BA Maintenance facility there. They had 747s stripped back to their bare metal for scheduled maintenance and at the end of the hangar were all the seats for our plane.
It’s very impressive and the guys there take a lot of pride in their work. Not least the staff in the canteen who provided us with a proper Welsh breakfast after our flight.
It’s an extraordinary experience being on a plane where you sort of know everyone there. It’s more like a party than a flight. I think everyone was very excited to be part of the inaugural flight of a brand new plane. And it was brand new. Everything was shiny and clean. All the seat belts were nicely folded. The screens and windows were unsmudged and there was no stale old coffee under the galley floor. If you’ve ever bought a new car, that’s what it was like. And yes, it did have that new plane smell.
PS One of the other guests on this trip has written up a great post about it. Check it out!