What's Up
by LeRoy Cook
5-5-2025
Suggested Banner: Nobody Hurt At Delta, Part Deux
The week's flying weather was once again spotty, until the
weekend brought bright skies and lots of air traffic. Practice instrument
approaches, concluding in missed-approach pullups, were prevalent, and work
continued at Butler airport on both the lighting system upgrade and the fuel
pump replacement. Hopefully, the two projects will be finished up together;
we've had no gas here for six months.
I journeyed to Fort Scott airport to provide a checkout
for a pilot taking an airplane to Wisconsin, and I stopped in at Harrisonville
to visit with local flight instructor Delaney Rindal, who's been operating out
of there while Butler is shut down. She participated in EAA Chapter 91's
monthly open house at Lee's Summit airport on Saturday morning. Thankfully, her
outside-stored airplanes escaped hail and wind damage from last week's storms
passing over the area.
In aviation news of the week, it was announced that Dynon
Avionics and Trig Avionics have merged; Dynon builds “glass” display instrument
systems for general aviation planes, and as part of their installations they've
used Trig's radios and intercoms, now brought in-house. On the airline side, an
“almost merger” cooperative arrangement is taking place between JetBlue and
United Airlines; they'll share some operating systems and facilities, but not
ticketing. A proposed merger of JetBlue and
American Airlines in 2023 was blocked as anti-competitive.
The U.S. Navy's Harry S Truman supercarrier, operating as
part of a task force in the Red Sea, has had a bad year. An F/A-18 Super Hornet
airplane was being moved on the downstairs hangar deck when the ship maneuvered
to evade incoming fire, and the $60 million plane and tow tractor were dumped
out the door into the sea. One of the F/A-18's was lost to the Yemeni
insurgents during a strike earlier, and the big boat has had a mild
fender-bender with a merchant ship as well.
Delta Airlines’ bad luck just keeps coming, it seems like.
We reported on various incidents at D/A last week, but now there was a report
of a ceiling coming down during a Chicago to Atlanta DC-9 flight on April 14th,
an embarrassing moment requiring passengers to hold up the plastic panel until
somebody provided sturdy tape to keep it in place. It's only cosmetic, but
shouldn't fall down. Delta offered 10,000 free miles to those helping.
The town of Stafford, Arizona is now waiving landing fees
for aircraft under 12,500 pounds takeoff weight, which used to be $2 per
thousand pounds, collected by a contractor harvesting data from landing
aircraft's ADS-B reporting gear. Apparently, everybody was avoiding Stafford
and it was generating an unwelcoming image, so the city fathers came to their
senses after eight months of billing the toll.
The weekly brain-teaser question from last time wanted to
know what U.S.-fought war started 75 year ago, whose aircraft are being
featured at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh this summer. That would be the Korean War,
officially a “police action” that we never really won. For next week, we want
to know where the little two-seat Ercoupe airplane, first marketed in 1940, got
its name. You can send your answers to [email protected].
