June 23, 2020 Happy Trails

The Liberty Gazette

June 23, 2020

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: When the Roy Rogers Museum in Branson, Missouri ceased to make a profit, the family closed it in 2009, auctioning the contents the following year. Branson was the third location for the museum. Its debut was made in the high desert of California called Apple Valley, where I have some great memories.

Pilots love any reason at all to fly some place. One of my favorite places to fly when I lived in California was the Apple Valley Inn, across the street from the Roy Rogers Museum. We would land at the Apple Valley Airport, call the inn’s hotline, and for a dollar, they would drive the five miles out to the airport, pick us up, and when we finished our meal, take us back to the airport.

But originally, Apple Valley Airport was located right at the inn. Having an airport on the property was a good way to attract prospects interested in purchasing lots at the Apple Valley Ranchos, of which the inn was a part. From that original airport, a pilot could practically taxi to the inn’s parking lot. They even had airline service from Las Vegas and Los Angeles. In its heyday, 200 airplanes landed at the airport each week. When Roy Rogers and Dale Evans built their museum in 1964, the couple leased the entire 25 acres of Apple Valley Ranch, and the inn became the Roy Rogers Apple Valley Inn.

Years before, when the airport was a gravel road, the TV character “Sky King” landed his T-50 Bobcat there and parked at a home next door, which was the iconic but fictitious Flying Crown Ranch. Nearby was where the Songbird buzzed over the cameras, and the mountains and desert-scapes were backdrops for the “Sky King” series. Later, Sky’s Bobcat was replaced with a Cessna 310B that looked fast even while parked. I grew up watching “Sky King” on Saturday mornings and loved knowing that “this was the place” where it was filmed. I was thrilled to learn that this was where Roy kept his airplane, also a Cessna T-50, and that Roy was a pilot. Like Sky, he parked his plane in front of his home.

A “new” Apple Valley Airport was built farther out from the growing population center and opened for operations in 1970. Throughout its history, Apple Valley, with its working and recreational ranches, offered a taste of the old west. The average Joe could mix and mingle with the “Who’s Who” while enjoying sunshine, airplanes, horses, and swimming pools. Because Roy and Dale were welcoming, it became a popular destination, and many flew their own airplanes into Apple Valley.

Roy had stopped flying and sold his airplane before I began making flights to the inn. He and Dale moved their museum to nearby Victorville, and eventually to Branson. You might remember watching Roy Rogers, that reel western movie hero in his sequined shirt, in the saddle atop Trigger, as he rode off slowly into the sunset.

Happy Trails…

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

June 16, 2020 Fake News

The Liberty Gazette

June 16, 2020

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: A friend tagged us in a Facebook post, asking, “What could have caused this? Didn't think the comments were too funny with the seriousness of this landing.” Linked to the post was a video of a wild ride that began with a steep angle of descent to landing, forcing the nose wheel of a 747 to slam down first, causing the airliner to bounce dramatically down the runway, dipping wings to scrape the ground at high speed, until the aircraft was back under control and stopped.

The video was one she saw on Twitter, posted by someone in Germany. The translation was, “After the LOCKDOWN I wait a little bit until the pilots are back in practice.”

The first clue that this person tweeting doesn’t know beans about aviation is that he called it “practice.” But the video itself caught many off-guard.

Mike: Microsoft Flight Simulator has an animation program, and this video was produced on that, or something similar. Sometimes, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will use such a program to take the data from the black boxes (flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder) to reproduce a mishap so they can visualize an accident sequence. In this way, major or contributing factors are identified, and the aviation world learns how to prevent similar situations by incorporating this knowledge into pilot training. This is one reason airline travel is statistically the safest mode of transportation.

This video, however, appeared to have been produced by a hobbyist. One of the big clues in the video is when you see the two left engines, which hang down from the wing, disappear into the runway and then come out undamaged.

The 747 has four main gear trucks. Each truck has four tires. Add the two tires on the nose gear, and you have an 18-wheeler. The landing weight of the airplane is somewhere in the range of 200 tons, all of which is put squarely on the four main trucks. There is no way those two small nose tires could take the impact at that amount of energy without being crushed, let alone cause a bounce.

Linda: I got wind shear once coming in to Front Range, Colorado. The wind changed directions about 10 feet above the runway, just past the threshold. I didn’t plant a nose wheel on the landing, but the sudden removal of lift dropped us pretty hard. Fortunately, there was no damage. But wind shear can ruin your day. So can poor decisions. Fortunately, no one was harmed during the making of that video, but an unstabilized approach, as portrayed by the simulation, could be disastrous.

Even with the long periods of inactivity, pilot training has continued. No airline pilot will set foot onto a flight deck and no U.S. airline would assign a pilot unless they were clearly ready to fly, meeting all the regulatory requirements for currency and competency.

This video is making its rounds, so don’t be fooled by fake news.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

June 9, 2020 The Ultimate in Social Distancing

The Liberty Gazette

June 9, 2020

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: Everybody’s talking about the SpaceX launch. After scrubbing the Demo-2 launch May 27, success came three days later. As we say, when there’s a problem, it’s better to be on the ground, wishing you were up there, than being in the air wishing you were on the ground.

But May 30 was the date when Falcon 9 sent Crew Dragon’s second demonstration mission from Kennedy Space Center to the International Space Station (ISS). This test flight with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley put the United States back in the business of human spaceflight. It was the final major test for SpaceX’s system to be certified by NASA to send humans up there again.

Mike: I had the honor of the NASA astronauts attending my International Procedures course. They periodically took it to keep current for flying within the earth’s atmosphere for travels to Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan to ride aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS.

SpaceX builds the rockets and NASA builds the astronauts. Their commercial crew program is expected to turn America’s future toward the moon, Mars, and beyond. Whoever said the sky’s the limit obviously wasn’t an astronaut.

It took about 19 hours to blast to their destination 262 miles up. How long Bob and Doug will be at the ISS is undetermined, but anywhere from 30-90 days, maybe longer. They have work to do, joining the ISS Expedition 63, maintaining the station and carrying out scientific experiments and tests.

Whenever they’re finished and it’s time to come home, they’ll depart in their spacecraft, jettison the trunk, conduct the de-orbit burn, which only lasts about 12 minutes, and will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere.

At 18,000 feet altitude, two drogue parachutes will deploy, and then at 6,500 feet the four main parachutes will deploy. They’ll splash down just off Florida’s Atlantic Coast at a velocity of 25 feet per second, and then be scooped up by SpaceX’s Go Navigator recovery vessel.

All of this, from launch to splashdown, happens autonomously. Bob and Doug even got a good seven hours of sleep on the way up.

Linda: SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, was so emotional that he could barely talk with reporters after the launch. He’s spent many long years building a great team and great products, working toward this day. Engineers of all ages, from all walks of life, jumped and cheered as they watched their personal contributions roar into space. These were the kids who chose STEM courses and studied, who stayed off the streets because the rewards are greater than thug life. Not all of them came from privileged homes, but all of them had dignity, made goals, and worked hard.

On May 30, in the midst of chaos, violence, virus, and fear, a tweet by a kid named Andy Milonakis went far and wide, with four million ‘Likes’ and a million retweets: “Congratulations to the Astronauts that left Earth today. Good choice.”

One thing’s for sure, space travel offers the ultimate in social distancing.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

June 2, 2020 The Sky Isn't Falling Anymore

The Liberty Gazette

June 2, 2020

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: The airline industry needs to get back to business, and we’re seeing the beginning of that, flying the airplanes they had parked as people are increasingly free to travel. Getting fleets back in the air will take time, with limited routes. Before this crisis, U.S. air carriers served around 600 destinations across the country. But some routes may not return, so corporate aviation, charter operations, and personal flying are filling in the gap.

Last week, I got a call to fly for one of my clients, a company in Cincinnati. First, I had to get there. Here’s my experience from my first post-Covid19 airline trip.

Options were not yet great, but I managed to get flights with only one stop. I checked for travel restrictions at the stopovers on each leg.

There were not many cars in extended stay parking at George Bush Intercontinental. But a couple weeks ago, there were none. I was the only passenger in the van to the terminal. The ticketing and check-in area were almost vacant. In the security line, I had to wait—for one person ahead of me. There was no separate TSA Pre-check line, but I was told that if I had “TSA Pre ✔” on my boarding pass, I could have gone through faster. My Global Entry card with TSA precheck didn’t count. I went with the flow.

Going with the flow also means wearing a face mask. The value of the mask is to keep the person wearing it from dispersing their microscopic fluids, not to keep them from breathing in bad stuff. But many travelers were not wearing a mask. Some had gloves and no mask, and some were so swaddled that I wondered how long it took to unwrap so the TSA agent could verify them against their photo ID.

Folks tried to space apart, sprawling across three waiting lounges. But attempts at social distancing can only go so far. The crews asked for distancing in the jetway and on the plane. Few people listened. They still jammed right up to the person in front of them, same as before the pandemic. With planes nearly full, keeping an open space between passengers isn’t possible anymore. Clear plastic partitions between the seats would compromise safety in an evacuation.

At the end of the flights, crews asked everyone to remain seated until the row in front of them was vacated, but some felt that didn’t apply to them.

On the upside, there aren’t many delays. The flight from Houston to Dallas scheduled for an hour and twenty-one minutes took an hour. But then we waited to cross a runway to the gate as ten airliners in a row took to the sky. Hundreds of airliners are still parked, but they are trickling into the air as demand increases.

These oddities may be with us for a while, but as the world begins to move and herd immunity takes over, life will eventually return to a more normal normal.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

May 26, 2020 Skunk Works

The Liberty Gazette

May 26, 2020

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: On December 20, 1989, the 25th anniversary of the SR-71 “Blackbird” was celebrated in style. This legendary aircraft impressed crowds with low passes at Beale Air Force Base, just north of Sacramento, then headed south for three low passes over the Skunk Works—official nickname for Lockheed’s Advanced Development Programs.

Soon after the celebration, politics forced the Blackbird to retire from military service. In its time, the SR-71 thumbed its nose at every adversary; no enemy could touch its speed and altitude capabilities.

The ingenuity to conceive of something so amazing was inspired by one man, Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the rough-and-tumble leader of the Skunk Works. His team of select and sundry aerospace professionals worked under tight security, often stricter than when building the atomic bomb. Even under that pressure, Lockheed cranked out airplanes like the P-38, the F-104, the U-2 and the venerable SR-71, and they completed those projects under deadline and under budget. The U-2 went from concept to flying prototype in less than 90 days. The stubborn and thrifty Kelly Johnson was proud to give back to the government unspent funds and show them what could be done when not impeded by government bureaucracy.

Building the Blackbird, they threw out the airplane design rule book and started from scratch, creating technology and production processes never before imagined. The plane was developed for the CIA in 1958 as the A-12, designed using slide-rules before calculators existed. It went from drawing board to first flight in four years. The team felt the earth shake as they watched the prototype thunder into the skies above Area 51.

On March 6, 1990, the Blackbird made a final sprint across the U.S. at an average speed of 2,120 mph. Traveling at 3.3 times the speed of sound—faster than a bullet leaving a rifle barrel—it laid a continuous sonic boom from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. flying 2,404 miles in 67 minutes. The boom was heard across the country. And the record still stands.

My logbook entry for December 20, 1989 records my personal brush with history. I had departed from Inyokern Airport in the desert north of Edwards Air Force Base, headed back to Ontario for another load of Christmas cargo. As I lumbered along in a bumblebee-like Twin Otter in the cool wintry morning air, I chatted with the Edwards Approach controller while transitioning their Military Operations Area. He asked, “Hey, do you want to watch an SR-71 take off?”

Who wouldn’t? “Yes!”

He had me loiter over Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale. I watched as a U-2 spy plane went first, and then the Blackbird. It accelerated down the 10,000’ runway rocketing westward, afterburners spewing white-blue-diamond shock waves. It reached 400 knots shortly after the wheels left the ground, then rapidly disappeared.

“Did you see it?” asked the controller.

“Wow! Awesome!”

“Did you notice the two hundred thousand people at the end of the runway?”

“Uh, no…with eyes on that black beauty, who would?”

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com