Bob Collins
‘We’ll call you when we get down.’ Those were the last words between a pilot and air traffic control shortly before a plane crash near Dayton Beach, Fla., that claimed the lives of two west-central Minnesota residents on Tuesday night. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Tag: Aviation
There is no news value in what you’re about to read. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I was elevating a personal story to the rarefied air of a NewsCut topic. But it provides some background for why posting will be light here today and also closes the book on a chapter of NewsCut that occasionally surfaced here: the time I built my own airplane in my garage. Read more →
Having just worked my way through Scott Berg’s long biography of Charles Lindbergh, and being a huge fan of John Glenn since I was a boy, Bill Flanagan’s commentary on Glenn (and Lindbergh) this morning was particularly riveting. Read more →
The Russian/Ukranian freighter landed during a snowstorm in Duluth yesterday afternoon for refueling after being diverted from its original Winnipeg destination. It had departed earlier in the day from San Bernadino.
It left Duluth before sunrise this morning.
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This is some amazing video from a passenger aboard the American Airlines jet that caught fire while on a take-off roll at O’Hare this afternoon.
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Hoover was a World War II fighter pilot, a former Air Force test pilot and the chase plane pilot for Chuck Yeager when he broke the sound barrier for the first time. Read more →
Eli Dourado and Raymond Russell tackle NIMBYism in their latest paper, claiming that complaints about airport noise come from a small number of people and disproportionately tilt noise abatement programs in a way that hinders the advancement of cheaper and faster commercial flight.
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One of the brothers who started Cirrus Design, the aircraft company, years ago is using the template to start another aircraft company in Minnesota. Read more →
There probably isn’t a pilot of small planes in America who isn’t holding his/her breath this afternoon waiting for the inevitable calls to ban aircraft in the wake of the National Transportation Safety Board’s revelation this afternoon that a plane that crashed in East Hartford, CT., yesterday was intentionally brought down.
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The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board are familiar with this helicopter, a Hiller FH-100. It had been involved in a June 2006 incident when the pilot reported he heard a ‘bang’ and then a shudder. The tail rotor had separated from the helicopter, the NTSB said. Read more →
The next time you get into a little fender-bender or are cut off in traffic and given to a bout of road rage, think about Thom Richard, a pilot who was stopped on a runway at the National Championship Air Races in Reno last weekend.
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A report says the airport will continue to focus on small private airplanes — business jets usually go to Flying Cloud or nearby Anoka-Blaine — and it stresses that it doesn’t see downgrading the role of the airport. But it’s recommending some runways be eliminated and the property opened to development.
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You must have to be a patient and forgiving sort to live near Roseau, on Minnesota’s northern border. People there have to put up with things we non-border people take for granted. The freedom to move around America, for example.
It took an around-the-country trip by a California teacher to tell me something about my adopted state that I didn’t know. There’s an airport in Minnesota on which a runway spans two countries, surrounded by some unwelcoming feds. Read more →
We’ve said it before but we say it again: No industry works as hard to alienate its customers as the airline industry does. Read more →
It can’t be much fun if you’re a Delta traveler today. All of Delta’s flights were grounded because of computer woes. Even when the systems are restored, the effect will ripple throughout the system for hours, if not days. That’s what happens when the airline industry consolidates. Read more →