LOTS GOING ON in the aviation world, beginning with the fact that I’ve retired my yellow highlighter. That’s right, I no longer carry a yellow highlighter as part of my pocket-flap ensemble of necessary cockpit gear.

Some months ago, you might recall, I talked about how, in the pocket of my polyester pilot shirt, you’ll always find three things: a ballpoint pen, a highlighter, and a red Sharpie. The highlighter I’d use for marking up the flight plan. I’d go through it page by page, striking the important parts in yellow: the flight time, the alternates, the dispatcher’s desk number, the airport elevations, deferred maintenance items, ETP coordinates, etc.

Well, now that our flight plans have gone digital, there’s not much call for this. We still carry a hard copy version of the flight plan, it’s true, but at this point it’s just a backup, rolled and stuffed into a cubby hole near the center pedestal. And you can’t use a highlighter, really, on an iPad.

What I’m not letting go of, on the other hand, is my beloved red Sharpie.

The Sharpie is my tool for what we’ll call high-emphasis tasks, the most critical of which is putting my initials on the cap of my water bottle, to keep other pilots from drinking from it (there are sometimes four of us up there). I also use it for my scratch-pad notes. When I’m in the first officer’s seat on the 767, there’s a clipboard along the bottom ledge of the window, just to my right. I keep a folded piece of paper there on which I jot down various quick-reference info — a distillation of bullet points from the flight plan.

I prepare the sheet prior to departure, while still at the gate, as part of my preflight prep. The photo up top is an example of a sheet used on a flight from Europe to the U.S. Here’s what it all means…

On Wednesday, Atlas Air took delivery of a Boeing 747-8 Freighter. This unit is the second of four new 747-8 Freighters ordered by the company in 2021, which are also the last 747s ever to be produced by Boeing, putting an end to the ‘Queen of the Skies’ assembly line.Earlier this week, we also learned that the second to last 747 rolled out of Boeing’s factory. Atlas Air will take delivery of the remaining two ‘Queens of the Skies’ this year, and Boeing will put an end to a 54-year history.

In 2020, at the height of the air industry pandemic crisis, Boeing announced it would stop making the classic 747 within the next two years. Atlas Air placed the final order for the iconic model in January 2021, requesting four brand-new 747-8F aircraft, in an order valued at over US$1.6 billion. This order would bring Atlas Air’s 747 fleet to 57 aircraft. The cargo company is already the largest operator of 747 Freighters in the world.

The 747 was truly a pioneer. It was the first-ever commercial widebody jet and opened up doors across the whole travel industry. Pan American leader Juan Trippe wanted an efficient way to place 400 passengers on one aircraft. Initially, he felt the best route would be to stack two single-aisle cabins on top of each other. Boeing's engineers came up with the widebody solution with a partial second deck.

However, in 1968, the program cost was already at $1 billion. This figure may not seem like a lot, but today, the cost would be equivalent to approximately $7.61 billion. The initial 747 rolled out of Boeing's assembly line in Everett at the end of September, and the type conducted its first flight on February 9th, 1969. //

A return flight between New York and London was retailing for approximately $550 in 1970. This is $5,350 with inflation. So, the higher business costs were backed by higher ticket prices to balance operations. Overall, flying was more expensive across the board during this period. Regardless, long-haul rates were generally higher pre-jumbo.

With Pan Am's management heavily involved in the launch of the project, the carrier naturally became the first to introduce the plane. In April 1966, Pan Am placed an order for 25 Boeing 747-100s. The total cost of this order was $525 million (~$4 billion today). So, Boeing was already halfway to matching the cost of the program with this invoice alone. Each unit would have worked out to cost approximately $21 million (~$160 million today).

The show will feature the first supersonic airshow in the US in over 13 years. Due to the location and mission of Edwards Air Force Base, sonic booms are authorized at this location. The Thunderbirds will be in attendance. //

Every tactical fighter in the USAF inventory will be present. B-1 and B-52 bombers will be part of the show.

Gregory “WIRED” Colyer from Ace Maker Airshows will be flying his famous T-33 demo.

The event is free to the public on both Saturday Oct 15th and Sunday October 16th. Gates will open at 8:30am on both days. The base will close when it hits capacity of 50,000 people.

flight tracking unfiltered

The Nighthawk remains an odd duck. Designated a fighter, it has no air-to-air combat capabilities. It paved a path for other stealth aircraft, but its children did not resemble it in the most important particulars. Its most famous moment came at the hands of the Serbian air defense network, when an enterprising group of officers laid a trap and managed to down one of the aircraft. Nevertheless, the F-117 was one of the most consequential aircraft for the future of military aviation, demonstrating the essential viability of stealth aircraft under conditions that the United States could reliably replicate. Its absence might well have left a large hole in U.S. aerospace strategy for the twenty-first century.

A passenger with no flight training safely landed a Cessna 208 Caravan in Palm Beach after the pilot became incapacitated during the flight. The flight from Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas to Fort Pierce, Florida was operated by Cessna 280 Caravan registered N333LD.

Pilot incapacitated, aircraft put into a dive

While en route from Marsh Harbour to Fort Pierce over the Atlantic Ocean at about 10,000 feet, the pilot of the aircraft became incapacitated and slumped on the controls. The aircraft entered a step dive turning right, before the passenger was able to gain control of the aircraft. He pulled the plane up, getting back to level flight.

Passenger gets some help from ATC

The passenger then called air traffic control to report what had happened. Air traffic controllers worked to find the plane and help him land safely. Controllers asked one of their colleagues who is also a certified flight instructor to help talk the passenger down safely. After printing out a copy of the Cessna’s flight deck, the controller was able to help the passenger safely land the aircraft in Palm Beach.

New photos from Hostomel Airport outside Kyiv confirm that the Antonov AN-225 ‘Mriya’ (Dream) has been destroyed, likely beyond repair. Here’s a look back at the life of the world’s largest cargo aircraft and single most popular aircraft to track on Flightradar24 ever.
In need of a giant—building the AN-225

The Antonov An-225 ‘Mriya’ was originally developed as a transport for the Buran space plane and the rocket boosters that would carry it to space. It was slated to replace the Myasischev VM-T Atlant as the Soviet Union’s heaviest lifter. Based on the smaller An-124, the An-225 shares a similar forward loading method of ‘kneeling’ to load cargo through its large open front when the nose is tilted skyward. The empennage was redesigned with twin vertical stabilizers to enable the carriage of large external loads, like the Buran, leaving the An-225 without a rear cargo door.

For decades, the general aviation industry has struggled with finding a replacement for leaded avgas without success. The biggest driver of this failure is that there’s no reason to do so because the industry has been given an exemption to continue using lead. In this two-part series, AVweb’s Paul Bertorelli explains how industry inertia and bureaucratic foot dragging killed efforts to eliminate lead from aviation fuel. See Part 2 here.

It goes without saying that everything should be done to make aviation as safe as possible. That being said, this seems like a solution that doesn’t actually solve a whole lot. How many people have successfully broken into a cockpit of a commercial airplane in the 20+ years since 9/11? I think zero globally, but someone correct me if I’m wrong. //

Let’s talk about another aspect of the reinforced cockpit door. How many planes have crashed in the past decade due to one pilot being locked out of the cockpit and not being able to get back in? //

To me pilot mental health and one person in a cockpit presents a much bigger risk to aviation than adding a second cockpit door. Admittedly this is more of a global problem than a US problem — at least US airlines are required to always have two people in the cockpit, which is why a flight attendant always has to enter the cockpit when a pilot leaves. This doesn’t apply to foreign airlines flying to the US, though.

The sophisticated chemistry involved in making the different colors and explosive behaviors of fireworks are seldom appreciated by the “ooh aah” crowds attending the displays, but suffice it to say that if you know, you know, and if you don’t, the show will still be impressive. However, fireworks can be even more impressive when viewed from above, or level with, the “bombs bursting in air.” Enjoy these looks at fireworks displays as seen from the Avgeek’s perspective.

When Cate & McGlone of Hollywood produced the film “JET MAINLINER Flight 803” for United Airlines in 1960, the subject of the film, the Douglas DC-8-21 airliner, had been in production for only a few months. Many of United’s initial batch of DC-8s were DC-8-11s which were upgraded to DC-8-12s and subsequently brought up to the DC-8-21 specifications over the next few years. United eventually became the largest DC-8 operator. The film, uploaded to Youtube by PeriscopeFilm, stars the United Airlines DC-8-21 Jet Mainliner.

As to that pilot shortage we keep hearing about, there are, in fact, two shortages, the effects of which are overlapping. One is short-term and pandemic-related, per above. The second is more systemic and longer term.

Carriers are now taking on hundreds of new-hire pilots every month. This, combined with the lingering effects of the pandemic reshuffling, finds training departments overwhelmed, with long backlogs for classroom time, simulator slots, line certification flights, etc. Pilot training is modular, and it does not happen quickly. New-hire training can take several weeks, as can moving from one aircraft type to another, or upgrading from first officer to captain. Many pilots are sitting at home, waiting their turn. Thus, it’s less a dearth of pilots than a training system overload.

Then we have the other, more systemic shortage. As I talked about in this older article, this is a significantly bigger problem at the regional carrier level than at the majors. All of the legacy airlines are currently hiring, and although they’re having no trouble filling their slots, those pilots have to come from somewhere. This is causing a ripple effect downward through the industry. The regional sector has all but reinvented itself in a plea for new-hires, offering salary and benefits packages heretofore unheard of for entry-level airline pilots.

For decades, the salaries and working conditions at regional carriers were laughably substandard. In many cases pilots were asked to foot their own training costs, only to earn poverty level wages in return. And as the regional sector expanded, taking over more and more mainline flying, a job at a regional often meant an entire career at a regional. This led to fewer and fewer pilots getting into the business, helping create the shortage we have today. These companies now have little choice but to significantly improve pay scales and benefits, both to entice new-hire pilots and to retain the ones they already have. You could say they had it coming; there never needed to be a shortage in the first place.

Overall passenger numbers are still off about 15 percent from 2019. The problem is, the 85 percent who are back are being crammed into an infrastructure that can’t handle them.

What nobody is talking about, meanwhile, is the issue of airspace and runway saturation. It was bad enough pre-pandemic. Now, several upstart carriers are pumping even more airplanes into a system at or beyond maximum capacity. It’s especially bad in the eastern half of the U.S. Things run fairly smoothly when the weather is good, but the minute a storm develops, blocking off air routes, the delays and cancellations start to cascade.

Even on clear-weather days, the taxiway queues at airports like Newark or La Guardia can be hours long. Airlines need to better rationalize their schedules and, in many markets, consolidate departures to help reduce congestion. To this end, the short-haul widebody jet is a concept whose time has maybe returned.

The altimeter design problem goes back decades. "Fundamentally, the problem is a design issue with the aviation industry's radar altimeters," Dennis Roberson, who runs a technology consulting firm and is a research professor at Illinois Institute of Technology, told lawmakers during a House subcommittee hearing in February.

When altimeters were designed, "they had very low-power neighbors, i.e., satellites beaming their information to the earth from very distant orbits... This led the early designers of the altimeters to decide they really could ignore their assigned spectrum boundaries, and as a result they allow transmitted energy far outside their band into the receiver," Roberson explained.

The aviation industry's slowness in fixing altimeters may lead to the FCC cracking down on bad wireless receivers. In April, the FCC voted unanimously to launch an inquiry into poorly designed wireless devices that receive transmissions from outside their allotted frequencies.

The inquiry could result in new receiver regulations similar to the rules that already require wireless devices to transmit only in their licensed frequencies. "To avoid harmful interference, we typically have rules about how and when transmitters can operate," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said at the April meeting. "But wireless communications systems involve transmitters and receivers... so we need to rethink our approach to spectrum policy and move beyond just transmitters and consider receivers, too."

the Shah was a very intelligent man and knew the benefits which an F-14/AWG-9/PHOENIX system would provide in defending the borders of his over country from Soviet overflights by MiG-25s. He made his decision in a carefully crafted speech to the Navy and Air Force participants. He told them his country needed an air superiority fighter such as the F-15. (This, of course made the U.S. Air Force participants almost wet their pants). Then he deflated them by adding that his country also needed an air supremacy fighter such as the Navy’s F-14!

‘Ever since then I have used the expression “maritime air supremacy” in describing the mission of a Navy fighter. So, whether we are talking about the airspace over a battlefield, or deep behind enemy lines or even over the open ocean in the vicinity of a carrier battle force, the Navy fighter needs to achieve and maintain air supremacy for as long as is necessary to get the job done!

The Air Force’s mission is considerably different. It has the mechanism in place to replace its attrition fighter forces much more easily than the Navy can. The carrier battle force must be more autonomous and self-sustaining. Its attrition fighter forces may not be so easy to replace. Therefore, it needs to be so much better than any forecast enemy fighter force that the exchange ratios will be concomitantly high, negating the need to do any substantial turnover of replacement hardware during the brief prosecution of the mission. The Navy’s fighter force must consist of maritime air supremacy platforms.’

G-UNET is 30 years old and was originally in service with Air Canada before being converted for cargo use in 2006. Since then, the aircraft has been flown by Air China Cargo, ACT Airlines, and Air CargoGlobal.

Air One Aviation Limited is an Exclusive Global Sales Agency that represents international cargo airlines. The agency organizes global charter services for freight forwarders, logistics providers, and charter brokers using freighter Boeing 747 and B737 aircraft. The jet is yet to be put into active service. //

East Midlands-based CargoLogicAir, which is owned by the Russian Volga-Dnepr Group, handed back its two Boeing 747-400Fs to lessors Aircastle and AerCap in early March. The move was partly due to Western sanctions affecting Russian-based businesses and airlines operating within the UK, EU, and the US. The decision by CargoLogicAir resulted in there being no UK-registered jumbos for practically the first time in 52 years.

Skunk Works says Darkstar isn’t necessarily real, but that the capabilities depicted are not necessarily “mere fiction.”

It’s not everyday you see an Embraer Phenom private jet fly an approach on a U.S. Navy carrier, but Top Gun: Maverick made it happen.

FLYING looks at the differences in miles per gallon among piston, turbine and jet models.