The 787 and Spirit/Opportunity

Boeing one week ago rolled out their newest aircraft the 787 Dreamliner. Basically it looks a lot like a 757 with a smaller tail, different unconventional cockpit windows, and the advanced raked winglets. Overall it is a pretty good looking aircraft and looks to be extremely powerful. If you were following this at all you might have seen some photos Boeing wasn't to happy about. An Airliners.net photographer had parked himself on the highway that passes by the Boeing final assembly facility in Everett, Washington and was able to snag some shots even before it was painted. After it passed out of the assembly building and was being towed to the paint building is when he was able to get the pictures. I'm really looking forward to seeing it fly in about a month.

The big news with NASA is that they may finally lose one of the Mars rovers. They plan on sending it into a valley that it may not be able to get out of because of the lack of sunlight. Spirit and Opportunity have now been on Mars for more than 3.5 years. That is an incredible feat since they were only meant to last just 3 months, they have now passed 13 times their life expectancy. Hopefully they'll be able to gain a significant amount of information for future missions to Mars.

Another update I forgot about until I was writing this. Cirrus has released a full scale mock up of their entry into the VLJ market. To me it looks like Cirrus has lost touch with their other aircraft. Their VLJ looks like a hydro jet boat nearly exactly, they just removed the forward section and added wings. The interior looks nothing like an aircraft at all. There are no backup steam gauges just a straight panel with absolutely nothing their. I'm sure it will be different when they actually start building a real one, but for now it just does not look very good.

Round Two

Well I'm glad I have committed myself somewhat to this, I think it will be fun. Anyway on the topic of space it is good that the shuttle Atlantis safely made it to orbit yesterday, unfortunately I was unable to watch the launch as I was playing in a soccer game. The game was the first I had played in 19 months and it was definitely good to get out there again.

Now I need to get back on topic and describe to you some of the aircraft that I think are aesthetically pleasing. These aircraft will not include some of my favorite aircraft that aren't so pleasing to the eye, namely my favorite aircraft the Dassault F-1 Mirage.

I'm going to do this in order of size most likely so I'll start from the smaller aircraft first and work up to the big ones.

So here it goes the first aircraft being the Cirrus SR-20 and SR-22. I can't say enough about the nice lines that these aircraft have. Everything is swept back and almost elegant in nature and I would only change several things to make them even more pleasing to the eye. On the SR-22 I would change up the wingtip extension that they added, it just does not look good from up close or when you see it in wing shots. The other thing that I would change are the exhaust stacks on the SR-20 they are way to long, I understand that this is for functional purposes, but they just don't look right.

The next aircraft up in class that I think has good lines is the Beechcraft 60 Duke. Everything about this aircraft has been swept back and looks like it was built solely for speed. There really isn't anything about this aircraft that I would want to change. Although the modernized versions with winglets I don't think look as good as those with clean wings. Some of the modernized variants have picked up aft body strakes which I think are a real plus aesthetically. The only thing I would really like to change about the duke is its reputation. It seems that they are maintenance hogs and so have gained the reputation as hangar queens, although to date I have seen several flying so I don't know if this is actually the case. AT least one has been granted the privilege of wearing Pratt & Whitney PT-6s and I think it looks fantastic.

Stepping up once again we move to the Dornier Do-328. This regional turboprop airliner is definitely the best looking regional airliner out there. With speeds nearing that of jets, clean lines, a high performance wing, and an awesome flight deck its no wonder I don't hear anything bad about this aircraft. I must advise you that it does have an extremely ugly sibling, the Do-328JET model which has the six bladed turboprops replaced by turbofans. This aircraft sounds as good as it looks, ten years ago I had the privilege of flying in one and it was one of the quietest aircraft I have ever been on, and I was in a wing seat very near those monstrous Pratt & Whitney PW119 engines.

The next aircraft on this list is the Dassault 900 Falcon. For me nearly all the Dassault aircraft should been on this best looking list with the exception of only a few. Marcel Dassault formerly Bloch must have really been inspired when he began creating his aircraft because they all look superb. For me the 900 exemplifies this beauty it has flowing lines, a nice wide fuselage, the ducted third engine, and the typical Dassault business jet tail. It seems everything on this aircraft is faired in and just perfect. My uncle had the privilege of flying this aircraft and he said he absolutely loved it.

In the next class up lies the Boeing 757. To some this aircraft is some what unattractive because its fuselage is so slender and long, and its engines are so big and powerful, but to me these are the things that make it such a good looking aircraft. Pilots consider this aircraft to be the sports car of the airliners because of how overpowered it is. I have heard a story through one of my friends about some pilot he had talked about how one day with no passengers on board and a light fuel load they did a performance takeoff in the aircraft and pitched the nose back to other worldly attitude. If you have not yet seen it I suggest searching the New Zealand Air Force 757 flyby on Youtube, that's what I'm talking about. As with the Dornier Do-328 the 757 has an ugly sibling known as the 757-300 which has been stretched to a length that just looks unsafe. The 757 features aft leaning twin bogey landing gear that look like claws off a falcon when in their down and locked position and this further adds to its aura as a bird of prey.

Finally there is the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar. This is the best looking of all the three holers, although I am somewhat partial to the MD-11 as well. This aircraft like many of the others on this list has everything tucked away and faired in. Something about the sheer size of this aircraft makes it impressive. Although this aircraft did not sell very well in comparison to its opponents the DC-10 and 747 it was probably the best of these aircraft. Lockheed spent a year extra working everything out on this aircraft so that it was absolutely a dream to fly. I've heard stories about pilots of this aircraft waking up in the middle of the night and going to sit with this aircraft it meant so much to them.

Those are my favorites for the civilian side of things, I'll be back at some point to give my military aircraft, and I may even give my helicopter favorites, if I'm in a good mood.

The Beginning

Okay I'm pretty new to this whole blogging thing both as a reader and as a writer but here it goes anyway. For the most part my blogs will be in regards to something aviation or space related.

To start things off I've had the privilege of being at the controls of four different types of aircraft, two of which are reflected in my log book. The others I was flying from the right seat and thus could not actually log.

The first of these aircraft being the Cessna 172 Skyhawk. The first time I flew a Skyhawk was when I was 16 at a summer camp at Western Michigan University. The actually aircraft's tail number was N993WW which is now owned by the International Airline Training Academy in Tuscon, Arizona. The first Skyhawk I ever soloed had the tail number N981BT and this is the aircraft the majority of my logbook times is reflected in. I've also flown N721AA and N996WW. To me the Cessna 172 Skyhawk is a perfect Private Pilot training aircraft. With relatively moderate performance, good visibility, and ease to fly it has been a pure joy to do my training in. It does however have a number of draw backs, mainly being its lack of power, and inability to carry any sort of useful load with the fuel to actual make a long cross country. Cessna has remedied this somewhat with the newer models giving them an extra 20 HP so that they now have 180 horses. When I have flown four people in the Skyhawk I've had to carry roughly half tanks, although the performance does not really seem to be affected to much, in cruise it will still do 110 knots.

The other type of aircraft that I have in my logbook is the Cessna 150. This is the Skyhawks smaller cousin. It is only a two seat aircraft and is probably about a foot abreast smaller than the Skyhawk. The other major difference is the seating position for the pilot. In the Skyhawk your seating up just over a foot off the floor in the seat with you legs extended down to the pedals. The 150 is another story, you're sitting on the floor kind of paddle boat style with your legs straight out in front of you. My experience with the 150 has lead me to believe that the aircraft has a mind of its own, possibly solely a result of it being so light weight. We pulled the power out and we continued to climb, then we'd put power in to climb and we'd descend it must have just been riding thermals. It is an extremely fun aircraft to fly although even more under powered than the Skyhawk it turns like nothing else out there. It has relatively big control surfaces for how big it is so it rolls into and out of turns very nicely. It also has 40 degrees of flaps which is somewhat uncommon for aircraft this small which means it will fly really slow. With power in and full flaps you can fly it well beyond its published stall speed to less than 10 knots. For this very reason many people have had the privilege of flying backwards in this aircraft with stiff headwinds.

I've also flown right seat in a homebuilt experimental category Vans RV-6A. If you have ever looked at homebuilt aircraft you'll know how successful Vans is with over 5,000 of there aircraft in the air. Before I flew in it I had figured it would be a bit of a step up from what I had previously flown in but I really had no idea. The RV-6A I flew in had a 180HP normally aspirated Lycoming engine driving a fixed pitch prop. I should have knew what I was in for by doing a little math before hand. The aircraft weighs less than 1,500, so about the same as a Cessna 150, and has 80 more HP plus a more streamlined design. When we rotated at takeoff we were doing a 100 knots in the climb and maintaining nearly 2,000 fpm climb rate. In cruise we were at around 180 knots true air speed. The other major difference to this aircraft than the others I had flown was that it had a low wing instead of a high wing. It also had no doors, instead it had a sliding canopy which I thought was neat, until we closed it and I had absolutely no head room. Another cool feature was that it had a fighter pilot like stick instead of a yoke that was pretty neat to turn with. Although I'm supposed to have a second flight with the guy that owns it I've yet to do that, he said I could ring it out a bit and head show me what it could really do. I think he meant rolling it and thinks which I'd love to be along for the ride and do.

Finally the coolest aircraft I've ever flown, the Cirrus SR-20. From first looking at it you can sense how cool it is. It has some of the best lines on any light single engine aircraft out there. For those none aviation enthusiasts I'll compare it to a car, and the only car in its class the Lamborghini. To start the Cirrus has Lamborghini doors so you know it is cool when you can taxi in after a flight with both doors popped open like that. It also features a full glass cockpit, meaning all the typical steam gauges have been replaced by LCD monitors, with the exception of the attitude indicator, airspeed indicator, and altimeter which are all still in place as back ups to their digital counterparts. The Cirrus is easily 30 knots faster than every other aircraft in its class and it will also carry a bit more than the others. Some of the coolest features of the Cirrus are found on the wings. The Cirrus features a dog tooth leading edge, which I'll get into at some point when I talk about modern fighters. It also features stall strips, which on the Cirrus are quite small, but I'm told that on the new Cirrus SR-22 G3 they are significantly larger. The basic principle behind a stall strip is to guarantee that the wing root area stalls before the wing tip, this makes the aircraft safer. This makes an aircraft safer because whenever a wing stalls, if a tip stalls before the other portion of the wing it will drop and you have the potential to enter a spin, which in the Cirrus has no recovery technique but to pull the chute. The biggest advantage to the Cirrus probably is its safety. The aircraft is virtually impossible to get your self into a mess that you can't get yourself out of as long as it had nothing to do with your decision making skills regarding weather, your ability, etc. One of its most known feature is mostly its CAPS (Cirrus Airframe Parachute System) which deploys a large canopy via a solid rocket that will bring the whole aircraft down in one piece. It also has many other safety features but I'm not going to get into them. The only draw backs I see with the Cirrus are that it has somewhat poor visibility outside, which is why I personally feel that it is probably not the right choice for a primary training platform. I do however feel that it is probably one of the best secondary training platforms on the market if not the best, it is a great Instrument aircraft as I had the privilege of experiencing 3 days ago as a back seat passenger. We took off into a cloud deck that was reported to be at 900 feet AGL, but was at more like 400 AGL, climbed through a 3,000 foot cloud deck, flew 100 nautical miles, descended through that same cloud, and made an uneventful precision approach. If you are someone that has $300,000 burning a hole in your pocket this is definitely the right plane for you, I cannot speak more highly of this aircraft.

Anyway I guess that it is a somewhat lengthy first blog, hopefully I'll be back tomorrow with my favorite aircraft.