News

Capt. George C. Watkins, a record-setting Navy test pilot, died of a heart attack Sept. 18 in Lompoc, Calif. He was 84. Watkins, dubbed “Gorgeous George” by fellow pilots, was the first Naval aviator to fly above 60,000 feet, then 70,000 feet. On one day in 1956 he set a speed record of 1,220 mph […]

Marta Bohn-Meyer, chief engineer for NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center and U.S. Unlimited Aerobatic Team manager, died Sept. 18 in an airplane crash near Oklahoma City. She was 48. Bohn-Meyer was practicing for an upcoming competition in her Giles 300 when the accident happened. According to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board, […]

J. Roy Shoffner, who financed restoration of the P-38 “Glacier Girl,” died Sept. 24 just two weeks after his 77th birthday. Shoffner, an entrepreneur with a passion for aviation, became involved in the final stage of “Glacier Girl’s” recovery from beneath the ice of Greenland in 1992. Following that, he took over responsibility for the […]

Robert Hanson, the last surviving “Memphis Belle” crewman, died Oct. 1 of congestive heart failure at his home near Albuquerque, N.M. He was 85. Hanson was the famous B-17’s radio operator through all 25 its missions over Germany and France.

Eclipse Aviation took delivery of its first flight-ready autopilot from Meggitt in September, passing another milestone along the path to certification. Although the company did not meet its goal for test flight hours as of late September, in part due to the gear-up landing of N505EA, CEO Vern Raburn remains confident that the Eclipse 500 […]

Corporate hangar space is so hard to find in the San Francisco Bay Area that even before the ink was dry on permits for a hangar construction project at Hayward Executive Airport (HWD), almost half of it had been spoken for. “The Bay Area hangar market is very tight right now,” says Scott Briggs, project […]

“During my 37 years of flying, I have observed the results of hundreds of weather events, including F4 tornados, straight-line winds, microbursts and severe thunderstorms. What I saw today was the equivalent of an F4 tornado that traveled over 100 miles along the Gulf Coast combined with a tidal wave. The difference was, this tornado […]

One way to cut the cost of the $100 hamburger is to pack your lunch. Many airport restaurants can help you with this. For example, the owners of Narrows Landing restaurant at the Tacoma Industrial Airport in Washington state now offers boxed lunches for pilots. Each box contains a sandwich of your choice, fruit, cookie […]

Where were you when NASA launched Space Shuttle STS-114? Approximately 433,000 people can say they were glued to their computer screens. According to NASA, that’s how many people tapped in to the NASA webcast of the post-Columbia return to space. The event is the most viewed NASA webcast, easily bypassing the number of viewers who […]