Air-Minded: Bob’s Your Back-Seater
I’m sure aviators everywhere chew over details, goofs, and errors in flying movies. And like me, I’m sure they love watching them.
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I’m sure aviators everywhere chew over details, goofs, and errors in flying movies. And like me, I’m sure they love watching them.
You could fly coast to coast in 1930, but your trip would entail a mix of short flights by day, overnight train rides, and occasional hotel stays when airline and train timetables didn’t mesh.
Even though GPS and computers do all the work today, student pilots are still taught to calculate speed the old-fashioned way, by timing how long it takes to fly between section lines, or to know how long to maintain a standard rate turn in order to turn 180 degrees (one minute). As on the sea, accurate timekeeping is essential when navigating by air.
We made do with what we had and improvised when we could. So do Russian pilots, apparently.
I’m following news reports of the “landing incident” aboard the USS Carl Vinson in January, wherein a Navy F-35C pilot misjudged his carrier landing approach in the last seconds, struck the ramp, and ejected as his aircraft slid off the deck, splashed into the South China Sea, and sank.