What's Up
by LeRoy Cook
.
June 29, 2026
Suggested Banner: GPS: Trust, But Verify
Almost daily rains dampened flight activity last week,
with the concomitant growth in the acres of grass needing mowing around the
Butler airport. If you think you’re having trouble keeping your home’s lawn in
check, consider the margins around a ¾ mile long runway and taxiway, hangars
and frontage. It’s been a hard year for the crew and equipment needed to keep
up with mowing at the aerodrome.
Other than for the few Kansas City-based trainers coming
in, and a departing Colorado-bound Cessna 182, transient traffic was light last
week, no doubt due to the weather. Locally, there were multiple AirTractor
agplanes working full time from the BCS base, Gerold Koehn had his Cessna
Skyhawk out, and Gerald Bauer and Jeremie Platt took their planes to
Harrisonville to represent us at the third-Saturday pancake breakfast.
Last month’s flight-into-terrain accident at Sierra
Blanca, New Mexico, when a King Air medevac airplane impacted a mountain while
descending to pick up a patient, seems to have been complicated by military GPS
jamming. Jamming takes place regularly in the Southwest for training exercises.
We are all so spoiled by our GPS navigation receivers that we can hardly find our
way without them. It’s important to realize that the Global Positioning System
belongs to the military, and we use it at their behest. At midnight in the
mountains, the King Air crew didn’t realize they had lost signal; you must
always crosscheck one navigation method with another.
The “free” presidential Boeing
747-8i bequeathed to the U.S. by the Emir of Qatar has been delivered to
Andrews AFB outside Washington, DC, where it is being given final preparation
for entering service, probably as Air Force One. Lavished outfitted in royal
service, it underwent special outfitting for the VIP fleet. It’s to relieve the
hard-working 36-year-old Boeing 747-200s, until Boeing delivers the two new
VC-25s on order, now expected in 2028.
Much has been made over the go-around by a Delta Airlines
pilot at Boston week before last; although cleared to land, he was aware of an
American Airlines plane that was cleared to take off on an intersecting runway,
and when he saw it moving after a delay he realized it would be too close and
pushed up the power to climb away. It seems to me that the system worked just
as it should; human at the controls evaluated and took action. Case closed.
Our previous column had a question about a monument near
Bazaar, Kansas in the Flint Hills. Tim Enos knew the answer; it marks where a
TWA Fokker trimotor airliner lost a wing in 1931, carrying famous football
coach Knute Rockne on his way to Los Angeles. Next week’s brain-teaser is,
“what is the approximate weight of a cumulus cloud measuring one kilometer on
each side?” You can send your answers to
[email protected].
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