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The job definitely isn't what it was. When I started, the then "old timers" complained about it, and now, 20 years later, it's fallen even further. ALPA is right on the mark in this case. It's not a pilot shortage, but a shortage caused by the steady degradation of the profession in real terms...

That's not exactly true. Some majors hired low time pilots in the late 60s, yes. It was for a few years. Most required you have a commercial-multi-instrument. It was pre-deregulation, so airlines had gobs of money to spend on training, and your typical airline course was 3 months long. Oh...

Seminoles especially have a very peculiar whistle to them, clean or dirty, from an observers perspective. I can pick them out flying overhead without seeing them. It's most pronounced when they're at pattern speeds.

I would add that the BNC connector needs to be CLEAN. I've seen more than a few airplanes with external antenna connectors that are all corroded to heck because they don't get used. They need to be cleaned up to be useful.

Ahhh, the perennial leaseback thread. Like rental properties, people see it on youtube or TV and say "anyone can flip houses or do rental property", when in fact, there's a lot of unspoken work, risk and hazard that goes into it. WAY back in the day, call it the 70s-80s, when FBOs were "one...

It looks like they simply ported the PDF that's generated by the default settings from the Leidos website. While I happen to like the Leidos briefing, they start with a options box that lets you tweak all kinds of stuff, and the HTML version of the briefing comes with a clickable index sidebar...

Agreed, so why are they hanging on to the intellectual property? "Monetization" seems like a buzzword that's all the rage. You'd think they'd be happy to sell it off, but instead they are keeping it tight.

While car makers don't sell parts for 50 YO cars, there are lots of other places that do. I have a catalog 3 inches thick on my desk that sells nothing but Firebird parts, and they're not from the factory. You can essentially build a whole car with nothing but a credit card. The STC / PMA...

What you have is a nasty confluence of events that conspire against what we all would think is "reasonable". Some of you aren't going to like the answers. Costs: Let's go ahead and beat the liability thing to death up front, and all the nasty stuff that goes with it. But let's not just blame...

Two more: A Cessna film from the late 50's I believe. A Beech film from the 70's. That's Cliff Robertson narrating. To answer the above question...these films would be sent out via the sales channels. Dealer networks back in the day were considerably more robust than today, and a lot of...

I'm going to sort of have to disagree, m'kay, with those that say THIS is the golden age. I started flying in the mid-80s. This was post-collapse of the GA market, but the infrastructure, people and environment was still there. Everyone still thought that "this is just temporary, it'll get...

Factory air conditioning on B58s is fairly common, especially as you move into the 80s. E55s also had factory AC, but it is fairly rare. B55s never had AC as an option. The FTA system mentioned above I believe is only for IO520/550 Barons, which would be the 58s and C/D/E 55s (or one the...

They still haven't fixed the airport remarks bug.

If you work it out to 3 shifts of 8 hours each, 5 days a week, plus 2 weekend shifts, plus some overage for management, supervisors, vacations and sick calls, there's probably only 50 on duty at any one time, if that.

No, he wasn't. Too bad you missed the weekend...that was summer.

A couple of observations from being there Wed/Thurs: Airplane population seemed to be down slightly. Vendors seemed SLIGHTLY more aviation oriented. Some years it seemed like the sunglasses, random non-aviation doo-dad vendors was a higher percentage. Several "old school" vendors have...

When I started looking seriously in 2010, there were a LOT of people still living in 2006. Today, 9 years later, there are still people with the same airplanes, in the same condition, just 9 years older, padlocked in the hangar, saying "the market will come back".

Yea, this is a weak spot in Chart Supplement, and has been for decades. A lot of times it falls under, as some have pointed out, "local knowledge". If I'm flying into someplace unfamiliar, I always ask ATC what the best contact point is on the way out. I guess the hierarchy of clearance...

E55's are very desirable. Short body, big(er) engines and were more often equipped with boots/radar...and sometimes even factory A/C. Overall more capable. Cherry examples tend to get snapped up. Leaving the "not so cherry" ones to sit. Some were just rode hard and put away wet. Not to say...

I actually spent some time with the DTC Duat people before their contract got terminated a few years ago. IMHO, their App was the best...no fluff or fancy graphics. Worked great for low bandwidth and you could literally plan, brief and file with one hand, then store the results for off line...