Airline Pilot or CFI?

This brilliant sketch manages to encapsulate my daily life as a CFI in the wilting summer heat. At 8 a.m. I’m Dean Martin. By 8 p.m., I’m Foster Brooks. Yes, it has quite a familiar ring to it, right down to the part about running an an hour and forty three minutes late for the next flight.

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Ground Control, New York Style

FAA Administrator Marion Blakey is fond of reiterating how controller staffing levels are sufficient.  Yet something tells me this guy might disagree with her. It seems to me that anytime a controller tells a bunch of pilots “you guys really should come up here and see this”, things can’t be going too well.  Viva la JFK!

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Going Around

I see go-arounds all the time at John Wayne Airport.  And not just with general aviation aircraft.  The big runway is only 5700 feet long, so there’s not much room for error, especially with some of the larger transport airplanes that fly into the airport.  For example, FedEx sends a fully loaded Airbus A300 jumbo into Orange County each day.  As far as I know, that is the largest airplane to land at SNA. Anyway, the Southern California geography gives us a semi-permanent inversion layer, and it’s typically accompanied by a slight windshear at that altitude. Of course, sometimes that shear is stronger than others, and a few days ago I watched 6 airliners go around in the space of 30 minutes.  One of them was a Southwest 737 which turned final...

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That’s Entertainment

Most corporate aircraft have no identifying marks on them at all because the company doesn’t want competitors knowing where their executives are going.  They even go so far as to have their N-number blocked from sites like FlightAware. But not all companies are like that.  KFC, for example, used to have a corporate airplane at SNA.  I’m not sure if it was based here or just came into Orange County frequently, but it always seemed to be on the field.  This thing was a beauty, a Challenger 604 painted in red and white striping. Unfortunately, the clean lines were marred by a giant Colonel Sanders logo on the tail.  Also, the 604 fuselage has a wide diameter, but it’s not very long.  So between the paint scheme and the logo on the...

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