October 19, 2021 Landing with an Audience

The Liberty Gazette

October 19, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: Last week I storied on about the new James Bond movie, “No Time to Die,” and the fun we found in my sister going to the show with a former U2 spy plane pilot. I happened to share that story with a Canadian pilot friend, who got a kick out of the fact that I had never heard of the actor who played Bond, Daniel Craig. My friend had once had the pleasure of having Mr. Craig as a passenger on his commercial flight. He said, “I remember looking back through the flight deck door and seeing him in the front row with his golfer hat on. He looked like he literally just walked off a movie set. I was all worried I was going to crunch the landing with James Bond on my flight. Luckily, I did not.” 

That’s kind of similar to what I’m thinking when we arrive at a fly-in, like we did last weekend for the annual fall Critters Lodge event in Centerville. It’s a 3,100-foot turf runway surrounded by trees. Nestled among those trees are coves cleared out for parking spots. People set up their tents and camp out next to their airplanes. It stands to reason then that unless you’re the first one there, you’ll have an audience. 

Mike: The first challenge is always finding the airstrip. The GPS gets us to the area, but the runway surrounded by piney woods isn’t easy to pick out. We can be deceived by the many small open patches in the furry green landscape until we are directly above it. This time, a glint of sunlight reflected from another airplane’s wing got our eyes focused on the right spot. Then we knew right where to join in the pattern.

The opening for the strip is not wide – about twice the wingspan of our airplane, so landing there can seem a bit daunting for some. Bright red balls mark the powerlines at the east end of the runway. Once we’re clear of those lines, we can reduce engine power and drop right down. Linda made a smooth landing for the spectators to envy.

Linda: Mike recorded it, too, so I inserted a few seconds of it at the beginning of my new Instagram video. I have experience with desktop video and audio editors, but this was my first experience using the app, InShot, recommended by my niece. It’s easy to use and offers a fairly nice variety of tools for moving, cutting, speeding and slowing, fading, and even reverse video. Free background music options only require that the artist be properly credited with embedded text on the video for a couple of seconds, and they make that easy, too. The music selection within InShot isn’t great, but their library is growing, and of course, if I had original music, I could use that instead. 

If you’re on Instagram, follow me at either @lindastreetely or @paperairplanepublishing, and boogie to the scenes from Critters Lodge.

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October 12, 2021 Bond. James Bond.

The Liberty Gazette

October 12, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: Last week the new James Bond movie premiered, “No Time to Die.” I’m no movie-goer and have never seen a James Bond flick and don’t plan to. Poking around the internet, I learned this was Daniel Craig’s last stint as Bond. I’d never even heard of Daniel Craig. But I was curious how many aircraft have made an appearance in these films. 

There have been 6 lead actors in 27 Bond movies, but it’s hard to tell exactly how many aircraft. It kind of depends on how you count them. Air & Space Magazine ventured a guess in 2015, but they were counting ‘flying machines’ and added them up to 160. They included parachutes, missiles, and apparently there was an ejection seat in an Aston-Martin, which is an English-built sports car. Me, I would only count airplanes, helicopters, blimps, and hot air balloons. 

Speaking of Aston-Martin, my father was the man who introduced the British automobile to the United States, which he did before I was born, when he owned a foreign car dealership in Evanston, Illinois. But back to the counting of ‘flying machines.’ They also counted them more than once. For instance, every time a parachute was in a movie, they counted it. Therefore, I won’t agree with there having been over 160 aircraft in Bond films, but there have been many. 

One with which I have a distant but fun personal connection was the small, single-seat BD-5J. If you’re a fan, you might remember the scene where Bond escapes the bad guys, and flying this ‘world’s smallest jet,’ guides a heat-seeking missile into their hangar to blow up their research facilities. Then, seeing he’s low on fuel, he lands on a road and coasts to a gas station. That idea came from the stunt pilot, Corkey Fornof. Years ago, when I was introduced to him, he bowed and kissed my hand.

True story: Corkey had once found himself in a pickle when the overcast layer was pushing him lower and lower, just above a pine forest. He decided it would be smartest to land on the interstate. The speed limit was 70. He slowed to about 103 as he approached a semi. He thought about landing atop the truck, but the upcoming overpass nixed that plan. The driver saw him, blew his horn to slow others down, and let Corkey land in front of him. At the next exit, the stunt man coasted his microjet into the Sunoco station and over the “ding-ding” hose. After a half-minute stare-down, it took some work to convince the attendant he wasn’t on “Candid Camera.”

So, there it was, last week, the latest Bond premiering in IMAX theaters around the country. Family friend and US Air Force veteran, Zach, asked my sister if she wanted to go. Decked out in tux and sleek black pantsuit, the pair arrived early for martinis at the pre-show shindig, to which my observant mother quipped, “Perfect! She’s going to a James Bond party with a former U2 spy plane pilot.”

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

October 5, 2021 The Great (Flying) Pumpkin

The Liberty Gazette

October 5, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: Welcome back, Autumn! You’re my favorite season. Great weather means loads of fly-ins, many with extra fun activities. A favorite flying game is to drop something from overhead, and the closest drop to the bullseye wins. One the best games is a ‘punkin-chunkin’ contest. I thought our Canadian friend Tom Martin was creative when he impaled a pumpkin on a knife and rigged it up to one wing of his airplane, with a trigger to let it go just above the port-a-potty target. Ingenious, but he didn’t win. Vietnam veteran Army paratrooper Bobby Bennet won. Go figure. 

Then just the other day I came across a video not to be missed. This time last year, the FliteTest team of Josh, Stefan, and Rob, had the wild idea to see if they could make a pumpkin fly. Stefan was tasked with finding a small pumpkin, under five pounds, around which airplane designer-builders Josh and Rob would build a drone. Unfortunately, Stefan returned with three large pumpkins because he couldn’t find any small ones. They weighed each one to the background of Stefan’s contagious, wide-mouthed laugh. The final pumpkin registered 20.4 pounds, which presented the ultimate challenge. 

Josh tasked Rob, the team’s “solution architect,” with reducing the weight by half and carving a jack-o-lantern face with a smile as big as Stefan’s. The idea nearly brought Stefan to his knees with laughter. 

Rob used a Snapchat pumpkin filter, took a picture of Stefan’s wildly smiling face, which brought the facial model to his knees in laughter again. 

Josh figured it would take four heavy-lift drone motors, each which can carry up to four pounds, for twenty pounds of thrust. The airframe, he estimated, would be five pounds. Rob would have to carve out as much of the guts as possible, yet not too much, to make the pumpkin strong, yet light. 

Meanwhile, Josh and Rob chose the perfect aircraft design: a B-24 Liberator. The laughing Stefan-faced pumpkin would replace the cockpit on their model. They built wing spars with foam, boxed in by strips of plywood and Poplar for strength, which joined a larger spar that went through the middle of the orange cockpit such that it would support the entire structure. Since every main component had to fasten to the structure inside the pumpkin, it was the fruit that became the airplane. They couldn’t take more than two days to complete this, as the carved cockpit was already getting squishy. Explaining the build, Josh was quick to say that viewers can take what they learned and apply it to building model aircraft. 

The seasonal black and orange paint job and the flashing LED lights inside the jack-o-lantern added pizzazz without much weight. Equipped with the latest Insta360 camera, FliteTest’s flying pumpkin took off, flew and landed successfully. The flight view was beautifully complemented by Ohio’s autumn trees at their Edgewater Airpark home. It’s a must-see on YouTube. Click, watch, and laugh along.

Flite Test's Flying Pumpkin

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September 28, 2021 Advantage: SFA

The Liberty Gazette

September 28, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: Great news! Stephen F. Austin State University is jumping in to help supply the next generation of airline pilots. Universities and smaller aviation companies across the United States and around the world are gearing back up to fill the void that has been developing for years. The disruption from biological warfare over the past couple years hasn’t changed the need. Airlines are expanding again after a pause, and many of their pilots are reaching mandatory retirement age, 65. 

Starting from scratch, there are a number of routes to the airline cockpit, and SFA’s Flight Initiative, starting this fall, helps make that process more direct and less time consuming. The university has partnered with HCH Aviation at A. L. Mangham Jr. Regional Airport, in Nacogdoches, to provide the professional flight training portion of the curriculum. The FAA has granted the company a provisional certificate to operate under the more stringent regulations. 

Students will train in state-of-the-art Redbird simulators that are interchangeable between single and twin-engine aircraft, and they will fly new Piper 100i airplanes.   

The Piper 100i Aircraft is an updated version of the Cherokee 180. It now has an advanced electronic flight information display with a GPS moving map and an autopilot, qualifying it as a Technically Advanced Aircraft (TAA). The instruments are computer screens, termed “glass cockpit,” rather than the old-style round instruments that pilots refer to as “steam gauges.” Most light plane manufacturers are no longer making complex airplanes with retractable landing gear, yet one of the requirements a commercial pilot certificate is 10 hours of training in these airplanes. With a shortage of this type, in 2018, the FAA added the TAA class of airplane as an alternative to meet the commercial requirements.

  

HCH’s program is geared toward putting pilots in the cockpit of airliners as soon as possible after graduation. The students not only train in technically advanced aircraft but also learn the standard operating practices which airlines use. By introducing the students to these practices early, their progress toward a pilot seat in an airliner is greatly enhanced. 

They will still need to meet the minimum experience requirements for an Airline Transport Pilot Certificate to be hired by an airline. But those required hours will be reduced once HCH is established beyond the provisional, or probationary status, and the students earn a degree from SFA in Aviation Science.   

Since the airline industry has made something of a comeback, the pilot shortage has returned, meaning flights will continue to be canceled until there are enough qualified pilots allowed to fly. To meet the demand, several smaller aviation companies now partner with the major air carriers as part of the career pipeline, and they will be looking to hire pilots graduating from the program at SFA to keep the supply of pilots flowing. 

Visit their Facebook page, HCH Aviation, and their website, https://hchaviation.com where you’ll note a professional pilot median career earning potential as compared to other careers, as well as training cost comparisons. HCH comes out “Best in Class.” 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com