I spend so much time writing about the safety and economics of aviation every now and then its good to go back and remember that flying was pioneered by risk takers who were motivated by many things, convention and common sense not among them. The role of adventurers in aviation was very much on my mind while reading Dick Smith’s thrill-a-page book, The Earth Beneath Me, the story of his solo helicopter flight from Fort Worth, Texas to Sydney, Australia in 1982. I met Smith this past June and flew with him for a not-to-be-forgotten hour. An Enya tune filled our headsets as we… Read More…
Most children are happy when their homework assignment gets them a good grade, but after writing a report about David Warren, the Australian who invented the black box, 11-year old Eve Cogan of Sydney, Australia, set her sights on convincing the executives of her country’s capital city airport in Canberra to name the airport after him. For her assignment to research a famous Australian, Eve could have studied Peter Blamey, of Bionic Ear fame. But having spent many an evening watching air crash documentaries with her dad, the child found the late David Warren a more interesting choice. “I’ve seen a lot of episodes of air crash investigation and a lot of the time it’s the… Read More…
At Revel, the fancy resort where I watched Atlantic City’s airshow, the weekend was dubbed, Come Fly With Me. At the bar, specially created nightcaps had enticing names like; Up, Up and Away, Howard Hughes, The Earhart, and Wright on Track. Promotional material put out by the resort said these drinks were inspired by the desire to bring back the glamor days of air travel. (That a casino operator is longing for the romance of times past didn’t come as much of a surprise; shorts and Hawaiian print shirts being the outfit of choice at most of them these days but that’s another story.) At… Read More…
Outside of Australia and perhaps France, there has been remarkably little attention paid to the very, very, very, near disaster that befell Qantas Airlines Flight 32 on November 4, 2010. This, you will recall, was the Airbus A380 with 469 people on board that suffered an uncontained engine failure shortly after takeoff from Changi Airport in Singapore. When the left wing of the world’s largest passenger jet becomes a pin cushion for the flying shrapnel formerly known as a Rolls Royce engine, it gets all kinds of ugly. Qantas captain Richard de Crespigny is the first to admit that and in his new book, QF… Read More…
There is a genre of aviation writing, typified by Antoine St. Exupery, Ernest K. Gann, Richard Bach and Rinker Buck that focuses on the link between the machine and the person flying it. These pilots write not just about the sky around them but the space within. Chesley Sullenberger’s fine memoir, Highest Duty, My Search for What Really Matters, joins this group. In the year months since he brought crippled US Airways Flight 1549 safely down in the Hudson River, Chesley Sullenberger has become the face of modern aviation. But it is doubtful he would ever have put pen to paper had fame not been… Read More…
