Aviation Blog - Page 56

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

Every pilot scanning the cockpit in flight is actually scanning two separate groups of instruments at once. The six-pack on the left side of the panel answers questions about where the aircraft is going: how fast, how high, which direction, whether level. The engine instruments on the right side of the panel answer a different

For decades, learning to fly meant learning to read a panel full of round dials. Each instrument did exactly one thing: the airspeed indicator showed airspeed, the altimeter showed altitude, the attitude indicator showed attitude. The pilot built a complete picture of the flight by scanning all six, over and over, combining the individual readings

Every aircraft has two speeds the pilot must never cross. One is the stall speed: fly too slowly and the wings stop generating lift, the aircraft stops flying, and the nose pitches down abruptly. The other is the never-exceed speed: fly too fast and the forces acting on the airframe exceed what it was built

When Kim Kardashian boards her Gulfstream G650ER, she isn’t stepping onto a standard charter. She’s entering a $150 million flying extension of her personal brand: cashmere headrests, custom blond wood paneling, SKIMS-branded slippers on every seat, and a strict no-spray-tan policy to keep the upholstery pristine. This is Kim Air, one of the most recognizable

See the private jets 30 celebrities actually own, from Taylor Swift’s Dassault Falcon 7X to Drake’s Boeing 767, and find out who flies the most.

Most celebrity couples share a jet. Jay-Z and Beyoncé have two — and one of them was a Father’s Day gift. In 2012, four months after the birth of Blue Ivy Carter, Beyoncé gave her husband a Bombardier Challenger 850 valued at $40 million. Not a watch, not a car, not a piece of jewelry.

In April 1991, Oprah Winfrey was sitting in Chicago O’Hare International Airport, four hours into a delay, on her way to an award ceremony for Aretha Franklin. A fan approached her and asked why she wasn’t hugging people the way she did on television. Oprah stood up, gave the woman a hug — and then