Tim de Vries - Page 106

Somewhere between the moment you book a ticket and the moment your aircraft pushes back from the gate, someone you will never meet has already spent the better part of an hour working on your specific flight. They have pulled the weather forecasts for your departure and arrival airports, selected an optimal route through the

Elon Musk’s private jet fleet is four Gulfstreams: the G650ER N628TS, a new G800 and G700, and a G550. Full tail numbers, specs and 2026 updates.

Most celebrities who own private jets have never touched the controls. John Travolta has type ratings for the Boeing 707, the Boeing 737, and the Boeing 747. He started flying at age 15. He navigated a Gulfstream through a total electrical failure over Washington DC using only a compass and a flashlight. And he lives

Sit down in the left seat of a small training aircraft and the first thing that hits you is the panel. Dozens of round dials, needle-and-scale gauges, digital readouts, switches, and knobs fill the space in front of you. From the outside, it looks like controlled chaos. From the pilot’s seat, it is something else

Look at the instrument panel of any small training aircraft and your eye will eventually settle on a cluster of six round gauges arranged near the centre. They are not random. They are not decorative. Each one answers a specific question that a pilot in flight needs answered continuously: how fast, how high, which way,

Imagine flying at four thousand feet through a solid layer of cloud. There is nothing outside the windows but grey: no ground, no sky, no horizon line to anchor your sense of up and down. Within about twenty seconds of losing your visual reference, your inner ear begins to lie. A gradual bank feels exactly

The descent has to be timed precisely. Too steep and the aircraft arrives over the runway too fast, the approach angle too aggressive to land safely. Too shallow and the pilot floats above the correct glidepath, consuming runway they cannot afford to waste. Somewhere between those two outcomes is the correct rate of descent, and

There is a moment on every cross-country flight when a pilot has been heads-down in the cockpit — managing the radio, checking fuel, working through the cruise checklist — and finally looks up to find they are not quite sure where they are. They know their heading: the heading indicator has been showing 075° the

There is a moment in every flight, usually during the descent, when a pilot reaches down to a small knob on the instrument panel and gives it a deliberate twist. To a passenger watching, it looks like a minor adjustment, barely worth noticing. What the pilot is actually doing is calibrating the altimeter to local

The turn coordinator is the most visually unusual instrument in the six-pack, and the one that most reliably confuses students when they first encounter it. It looks like two instruments sharing a single face: the upper half shows a miniature aircraft that banks left or right to indicate the rate of a turn, and the