Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
The Beech Starship is no more. Yeah, I know, it was too expensive, too heavy, didn’t carry enough, didn’t go far enough, all that stuff. But it was so cool looking. Whenever anybody would start to say “I saw this really weird looking plane, do you know what it was?”, you could answer “Beech Starship” without even letting them finish, and be right 90% of the time.
Here’s a picture of the last of them sitting on storage at Pima.
Pilots say that a good landing is one where you and most of the passengers walk away unscathed, and a great one is one where you can use the plane again afterwards. This is merely a good landing.
Initial reports are that they sucked in a flock of geese.
If you want to see what happened to one of our club’s planes when it hit a couple of geese click here.
If I had a few extra million dollars and a Boeing 707 to spare, I’d like to live like that.
I’m currently without an aviation medical. If you want all the gory details as to why, you can read
this entry in my old journal, and you can read why it’s taking so long at this other entry.
In order to not just sit around on my ass having all my skills atrophy, I decided to check out in our club’s Lance. The club requires a 10 hour checkout, today I did 1.5 hours.
It was a lot of fun. The plane is big and heavy and a bit of a wallowy pig if you let it get slow, but at 90 knots on a standard landing pattern or 120 knots on an ILS, and it is steady as a rock and lands smoothly. It’s touchy on the throttle and propellor controls. But it’s fast and carries a ton literally – it’s got a max gross takeoff weight of 3600lbs and an empty weight of 1241. I’m looking forward to taking some long trips in it.
Final Concorde Flight Lands at Heathrow (washingtonpost.com)
The most beautiful airliner ever built has passed into history. We will not see its like ever again. Sigh. With it goes the last vestige of the era where people though we could do anything, from fly to the moon to solve world hunger.