Thanks for taking our survey!

To state the obvious, at Plane & Pilot we pride ourselves on being on top of politics only as it relates to airplanes! Users fees, closing airports, airworthiness directives and pilot enforcement actions—we’ve got strong opinions about all those things and share them unabashedly. The rest of it? Well, there are plenty of websites and social media places (way too many, we’d say) where people can spar. Here it’s all bout the flying. We are curious, however, to hear how politics has affected your flying life. And we thought you might be interested in seeing what your fellow pilots are saying about that, too.

The post Plane & Pilot Survey: Pilots and Politics appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

Gainesville, Georgia/Injuries: 1 Fatal, 2 Serious

The commercial pilot receiving instruction and a flight instructor were conducting a local instructional flight when the engine lost partial power and oil obscured the front windscreen. The instructor took control of the airplane and maneuvered toward a highway on which to conduct a forced landing; the airplane struck power lines and a vehicle before veering off the road and down a steep embankment, where it came to rest inverted.

Examination of the engine revealed that the No. 2 cylinder had separated from the cylinder mounting deck. The No. 2 cylinder rocker box cover and a pushrod tube were protruding from the left forward side of the cowling. The No. 2 cylinder connecting rod was protruding through the top of the cowling. The No. 2 cylinder base studs and thru bolts remained in the crankcase and were fractured at their threaded section. Metallurgical examination revealed that each of the fractured surfaces exhibited evidence of crack arrest marks consistent with fatigue cracking and microvoid coalescence features typical of overstress separation. The crankcase web mating surfaces at the Nos. 2, 3 and 4 bearing journals exhibited pitting consistent with fretting, which is typically a result of inadequate preload tension or loss of preload tension to the fasteners that secure the cylinder to the engine. The inadequate or loss of preload resulted in fatigue cracking of the No. 2 cylinder studs and thru-bolts, and the subsequent separation of the cylinder.

According to maintenance records, the engine underwent a major overhaul about 4 years before the accident and had accrued 1,071.11 hours since the last overhaul. At the time of the overhaul, the crankcase was reassembled, and all four cylinders were installed. It could not be determined if the thru-bolts and studs were improperly tightened by maintenance personnel at the time of the overhaul or during an undocumented maintenance action that was performed after the overhaul.

Toxicology testing of the flight instructor revealed an unquantifiable amount of doxylamine, a sedating antihistamine that was well below that considered to cause significant effects. Therefore, it is unlikely that the pilot’s use of doxylamine contributed to his inability to successfully perform a forced landing on a highway.

Probable cause(s): A partial loss of engine power due to inadequate thru-bolt and stud preload tension by undetermined maintenance personnel, which resulted in fretting between the engine crankcase halves, and the subsequent separation of the No. 2 cylinder due to the fatigue failure of the No. 2 cylinder stud/thru bolts.

The report republished here is from the NTSB and is printed verbatim and in its complete form.

The post Accident Brief: Piper PA28R Crash In Georgia appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

A yellow and white Cessna 170 clawed into the air as I drove up, the classic Wichita beauty climbing smartly into the cold January wind. Leaving my rental car at the gate and walking out onto the ramp, I heard the Cessna’s growl fade into the distance. The taildragger’s departure was a false sign of life, a snore from a patient in a coma. As it faded away, it left only the sigh of a breeze pushing through the stubble of mowed-over cornstalks in neighboring fields. There are many hours an airport lies quiet and still, but this silence was on its way to being terminal. I was visiting an airfield that wasn’t long for this world.

But this airfield, a single turf runway aligned northeast and southwest, with a single, lonely building on one side, hadn’t always been struggling toward its last breath. And while the airport bears John Trinca’s name, and his signature in the concrete, a more recent operator of the field is the one most associated with it.

Bob Mazure started hanging around central New Jersey’s Trinca Airport in the 1980s and remembers it fondly. “Pete Billow ran the place and instructed in Cubs. Even then, he was a crotchety old guy, but everyone knew that if he taught you how to fly, by golly, you could fly an airplane.”

Mazure, who flew KC-97s and KC-135s in the Air Force and later retired from American Airlines, bought a Stampe SV4 biplane, a French aerobatic machine, and kept it there for years. Its Renault engine proved less than reliable, and Trinca’s isolated location turned out to be a perfect place to fly from. “I’ve had two engine failures in single-engine aircraft, both at Trinca in the Stampe,” he recalled. The first time, the fuel system failed to feed while inverted on a test hop over the field at 3,000 feet. “The prop stopped instantly. I just brought it back around and made a normal landing. One of the Cubs had landed out in the cornfield nearby; they helped me to push the plane back off the runway.” The next failure, years later, was a little more catastrophic. “Climbing through 700 feet, it started shaking like mad. I made it back to the runway and found a connecting rod had snapped, knocking out a half-square-foot hole at the engine mount. The whole engine was wobbling loose.” 

Again, a Cub had landed in the cornfield next door. “After that, if I saw a Cub in the cornfield, I just went somewhere else,” Mazure joked. He later bought an AT-6, and shoehorning the big trainer into Trinca took some effort. There were longer runways nearby, but Bob stuck with Trinca as his home base. “That 1,800-foot runway was tight, so you had to be right on the numbers.”

The grassroots crowd continued through the 1990s. Darren Clarkson, now a 737 captain, showed up around 1990 or 1991 and was one of Billow’s last students. “I’m sure he did some tailwheel training with other pilots after me, but I was his last student to start from scratch and continue through solo,” he said. “I later found out he had macular degeneration and knew his flying days were numbered, but he soldiered on and didn’t ease up a bit.” The airport was tired and ratty, as was the main Cub he trained in, N91949. “There was no intercom, and Pete didn’t talk much anyway. He might say 10 words in the course of a flight. If you needed rudder, you felt a push on the pedal. If you needed to get the nose down, a nudge on the stick would let you know.” Billow taught attitude flying; Clarkson said his first time seeing the airspeed indicator from the backseat of the J-3 was on his solo. Having grown up with early flight simulator programs, he knew that speed mattered and once asked what speed he needed to fly. “You don’t need to see all that,” Pete told him. “Just put the nose here, and it’ll fly.” In fact, the only instrument Bellow really cared about was the altimeter. “He wanted us at 1,100 feet before we turned out over a neighborhood nearby. Not 1,090 feet. It had to be exact,” Clarkson said.

As demanding and cantankerous as Bellow was, the man had a soft spot or two. There was always an airport cat around, Clarkson recalled. One even took a flight of its own. “There was a lady in a Cessna 172 who had fired up, and she always took a long time before she taxied out. One day she was sitting there, engine running, and the cat gave chase to a rabbit. The thing cut under the airplane, and the cat went through the prop. Thwack. We all heard it. The cat sailed a good hundred feet through the air and landed in a nearby hangar.” Pete walked over with a shovel and a garbage bag to collect the remains, only to find the cat licking its wounds, one side splayed open with ribs exposed. The cat, previously unnamed, lived for years after with a new name. Anyone who hung around Trinca field at the time will remember the cat named Propwash.

But the years passed, and so did the cat. Eventually, Pete did as well, at age 83.

Trinca is slated to close in a few months, a quiet death assigned to a small field whose passing will hardly draw notice from the aviation community. It’s no Meigs field or Santa Paula. A rural strip in the middle of New Jersey was an unlikely place for a farm boy turned aviator from Georgia to be standing on a cold February day, but I’d also been there 17 years before, as college kid with wet ink on my pilot and mechanic certificates. A friend had bought a Beech Musketeer to train his boys to fly in, and while the purchase wasn’t sight unseen, it may as well have been. It had been long neglected, and though he’d bought it for a song, he got what he paid for. I went up to spearhead the effort to get it flyable, so we could bring it home to Georgia. 

Through the late 1990s, I’d hung out on AOL’s two main aviation chat rooms. There I met a number of characters, three or four I’ve met in person over the years. One of those guys was John Tremper, a mechanic, pilot and flight instructor who had a hangar at Trinca, where he maintained, restored, and instructed in Cubs, Champs and the like. When I got through finding a ton of things for the Musketeer’s mechanic to fix, I hung out with John for a day or two at Trinca and at the nearby Aeroflex-Andover Airport. As he gave me the grand tour at Trinca, I struggled to keep my jaw off the ice-crusted ground as he ushered me between hangars with an AT-6, Mazure’s Stampe and a Great Lakes, as well as a number of other stick-and-rudder machines. This wasn’t a polished operation; if anything, it was the opposite. The hangars were a patchwork of different building materials. Many of the fabric airplanes had survived numerous winters in the elements, and they all had the scars to prove it.

Even then, in 2002, the airport’s fate had been sealed. On my more recent visit, Tremper told me how Billow had big plans for the place at one point. He drew up designs similar to nearby Sussex airport and had hoped to draw in more traffic, including some larger airplanes. He replotted the runway a few degrees off the original orientation, so he could lengthen it. “But at a meeting, he used the wrong word. Instead of expand, he should have said improve,” my buddy said, and from that point, the fates turned against Billow. The township opposed the changes, and instead of blossoming into a great community airfield, Trinca withered on the vine. Eventually, the airport went up for sale. The township swept in with an eminent domain order and took the property for a million dollars less than Billow had hoped to get for the place. The new management of the airfield ranged from inept to vindictive, depending who you asked, and tenants progressively pulled up the stakes, flew over the hill and tied down at Aeroflex-Andover Airport or elsewhere. John was the last tenant, evicted a year before my return to Trinca. The hangar he’d used as a workshop now houses equipment from the township.

So as I stood on the ramp, watching the wind whistle through a shredded, faded windsock, I certainly had the place to myself. I’d not bothered locking the car; anyone approaching would have been visible from far away. My thoughts drifted to other airports closed or closing, ranging from the midnight assault on Meigs mounted by the Daley political machine in Chicago to the incrementally slow death forced upon Santa Monica Municipal by the city itself. Here in New Jersey was an airport with a death sentence whose only crime was being a $17,000-a-year drain on the community, a community that hadn’t bothered trying anything revolutionary like selling fuel or building hangars. Instead, the town’s preferred tool for change at the airport was a bulldozer.

“They tore the roof off the office,” John told me, “and didn’t bother replacing it for a year. It was constantly flooding. Multiple pages of drainage plans were executed, and what it did was create a swamp. Tadpoles filled a giant pool of water, and one day I came to the airport and the thousands of tadpoles were suddenly thousands of frogs. I had frogs in hangars, in airplanes, and one was even perched on top of the control stick in my Cub.”

I joined Tremper at Aeroflex, where there were plenty of planes—but not much activity. General aviation has suffered in the region, stifled by Temporary Flight Restrictions whenever the president headed to play golf at his nearby Bedminster resort. John pointed out planes that had migrated from Trinca, but many of them had not flown since their repositioning flight.

Billow’s old Cub, N91949, is now Clarkson’s Cub and is partway through a restoration. Darren bought the project years ago and had hoped to fly it back to New Jersey, to set it back down onto the same patch of grass where his flying career began. The restoration won’t be done in time, though. There are too many projects and not enough man hours, he lamented. When it does take wing, it’ll be a fitting tribute to the instructor who launched and influenced the flying lives of many.

My visit couldn’t run very late—I had an early hotel shuttle to Newark the next morning for my next flight. As I parted, John apologized. “Sorry you came out here for nothing,” he said.

It really wasn’t a matter of expecting any level of activity. I just wanted to say goodbye. You’d do it for a friend on life support even if you thought they couldn’t hear you. It seemed the dying soul of an airport might likewise desire a little company from a sympathetic visitor before it slipped away, too.

The post Words Aloft: Farewell To Trinca Airport appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

You’ll notice that very little of our issue covers the effects of the coronavirus on aviation, though that remains overwhelmingly the biggest story in the world and in our little aviation niche, too.

When we announced last month that we would be putting together special features dedicated in part to the strength of the people like you and me who fly small planes, the response was enormous. The idea, which resonated strongly with our readers, was not so much to document the effects of the novel coronavirus but to highlight the resilience of the people who fly small planes in the face of that virus. So we wanted to share with you the faces, the stories and the strength (and, okay, the planes) of our readers. We think that you will find them as moving and inspirational as we have. (SCROLL DOWN TO MEET OUR READERS AND READ THEIR STORIES)

Plane-Strong Pilot-Strong Sales To Benefit Sun ‘n Fun

The post Plane Strong, Pilot Strong: Undaunted In The Face Of Challenge appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

Keystone Heights, Florida/Injuries: 2

The pilot reported that, after landing on runway 11, he realized runway 5/23 was being used as a taxiway so he back taxied onto runway 23. He saw another airplane taxiing toward him and made several CTAF transmissions to the pilot but received no response. Not knowing the taxiing airplane’s intentions, he maneuvered his airplane to the left side of runway 5, and the left wing struck a construction sign. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the left wing and aileron. The pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.

Probable cause(s): The pilot’s failure to maintain clearance from a construction sign during taxi operations.

The post Accident Brief: BEECH Muskateer Incident In Florida appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

First documented: 1915
Message: “Good Night” by Art Smith (U.S. barnstormer)

First used in public advertising: November 1922
Location: New York Times Square
Message: “CALL VANDERBILT 7200”
“VANDERBILT 7200:” Phone number to hotel where the pilot was staying
Phone calls hotel received in three-hour span: 47,000

Skywriting Corporation of America (SCA) founded: 1923
First SCA advertiser: Lucky Strike Cigarettes
Message: “L S M F T” (Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco)
Other major advertiser: Pepsi-Cola
States where Pepsi advertised: 48
Pepsi skywriting ads in 1940: 2,225
Maneuvers required to write the word “PEPSI:” 17
Minutes needed: 10

What the media dubbed skywriting: “Celestial vandalism”
Popularity decline: 1950s (television)
Reason: TV ads not weather-dependent
Became popular again: 2010s
Cause: Social media
Reason: Messages shared online boost ad visibility

Ideal weather: Cool, humid, windless, clear
Common altitude: 10,000 feet
Aircraft speed: ~150 mph

What creates skywriting smoke: Paraffin oil in exhaust
Degrees at which paraffin vaporizes: 1,500°
Environmental concerns: None
Width of smoke streams: 75 feet

Time needed to create a single letter: 60-90 seconds
Average size of each letter: 1 mile tall
Letter capacity of each message: 12
Radius of message visibility: 30 miles
Minutes visible before dissipating: ~20

Average cost: $2,500
Most popular non-ad message: Marriage proposals
Average proposals written/year by one NYC company: 50

Hi-tech version of skywriting: “Skytyping”
Method: Software signals plane to emit small, uniform smoke puffs
Resembles: Dot Matrix Printing
Aircraft used for each skytyping assignment: Five or more
Special maneuvering required: None
Characters written/minute: 10-12
Maximum letter capacity for skytyping: 30
Skytyping teams in U.S.: 3 Cost: $15,000+/message

The post Plane Facts: Skywriting appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

The post Snap Roll Quiz! Piper PA-28 Cherokee appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

Probable cause(s): The pilot’s improper pitch trim setting during takeoff in a left quartering tailwind, which resulted in the airplane abruptly pitching up and subsequently experiencing an aerodynamic stall. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s failure to follow a preflight checklist and verify that the elevator trim tab was in the takeoff position.

NOTE: The report republished here is from the NTSB and printed verbatim and in its complete form.

The post Accident Brief: Beechcraft 36 Bonanza Crashes On Takeoff In Texas appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

It’s the same in aviation. The Wright Brothers. Charles Lindbergh. Jena Yeager and Dick Rutan, Steve Fossett. All famous first achievers.

But there’s a whole other segment of accomplishments: the last, or mostly likely, the last time something has been done. A dozen things that will (in most cases) never be done again. For many of them, that is a very good thing. For others, it’s bittersweet. And for all of them, the accomplishment, while in some ways more poignant that the initial accomplishment, have largely faded into the annals of history. 

1. JATO Bottle On An Ercoupe

Back in 1941, engineers wanted to know how much improvement to takeoff performance strapping a small rocket to the side of an Ercoupe could make. Answer: a lot. The test, conducted at March Field in Southern California, used a solid fuel rocket—yes, they still call it a JATO (jet-assisted takeoff) and not a RATO—that put out a modest 28 pounds of thrust for 12 seconds. Doesn’t sound like much, but that Ercoupe really went up fast! 

2. 1,200 People On A 747?

In the early 1990s, regime changes in Ethiopia sparked renewed concerns about the welfare of Ethiopian Jews, prompting Israel to launch Operation Solomon, which airlifted nearly 15,000 refugees to Israel in a span of just 36 hours. One of the planes pressed into service, an El Al Boeing 747, airlifted a record number of passengers, which is widely reported as 1,088, though it’s believed that many children made their way onto the plane hidden inside their mothers’ skirts. 

3. Jumping INTO An Airplane!

This is as crazy as it sounds, but on two separate occasions, a total of three wingsuit flyers flew into the open doors of an airplane. The most recent and presumably last such leap was accomplished in 2017 by Fred Fugen and Vince Reffet, who lept from an alpine peak and flew into the open doors of a Pilatus PC-6. They made the jump on the 20th anniversary of the first such successful leap, by French wingsuiter Patrick de Gayardon. 

*Editor’s note: Okay, this is one “last” that didn’t stay that way. In 2022, a pair of pilots infamously attempted to bail out of their respective Cessna 182s and fly into the other pilot’s plane. One of them managed to do that, while the other had to parachute to safety, with the plane crashing catastrophically (with no injuries on the ground.) The FAA, as you might imagine, wasn’t amused.

4. Two Months Non-Stop In A 172

A pair of aviators, Bob Timm and John Cook, set the endurance record of all endurance records when, in 1958, they flew a specially outfitted and highly modified Cessna 172 around the desert of the American Southwest for 64 days, 22 hours and 19 minutes. During that time, they were refueled more than 125 times from a speeding pickup truck on a flat stretch of highway below. The Cessna 172 they did it in is now hanging in the rafters at McCarran International Airport. 

5.Smoking On U.S. Airliners

Smoking on a plane. Makes sense, right? No! But for decades, it was standard practice. Over time, good sense took hold, and lighting up in the cabin was crushed out like a bad butt. On June 3, 2000, the United States banned smoking on all domestic and international commercial flights. China didn’t ban smoking on its flights until 2017, though reports are that it continues to allow its pilots to smoke in the cockpit. 

6. Super-Noisy Jets

As of 2015 in the United States, the noisiest jets (Stage 1) were banned from operating, part of a successful program to cut aircraft noise by a whopping 32dB.

7. Last All-Male Air Force Academy Class

The 1979 class was the last one that featured an all-male cast, as in 1976, 176 female cadets joined the ranks and graduated in 1980. Hats off to all!

8. First Flyer‘s Final Flight

In 1944, the first person to fly a powered heavier-than-air craft made one last flight, hopping a ride with Howard Hughes aboard a Lockheed Constellation. Orville Wright was 73 years old. (His brother Wilbur had died in 1912 of typhoid fever.) Four years after his literal final sortie, Orville took his figurative last flight, dying of a heart attack at the age of 77. 

9. Landing Atop Mt. Everest

Didier Delsalle landed his Eurocopter AS350 Squirrel atop the world’s highest piece of real estate on May 14, 2005. He repeated the feat the next day to show it was no fluke. No fluke, but it was treacherous and super risky. The hardest part, he said, was landing on the snow, not knowing how much snow he would have to settle through before his helicopter settled its weight on the world’s most famous summit.

10. Under The Eiffel Tower

To commemorate a famous 1944 dogfight, in which American P-51 pilot and fighter ace William Overstreet Jr. chased a Messerschmitt 109 under the Eiffel Tower, a Bonanza in 1991 repeated the feat, with support from the French government. How many pilots have flown under the arch of the tower? Probably more than a few. It has been done since at least since WWI, and few of the pilots who have done so stepped up to take credit for the feat. 

11. Landing Inverted

Can a plane land inverted? Of course, it can. Aerobatic airplanes are regularly flown upside down. But landing? Piece of cake for a skilled aerobatic ace, though. But unless it’s got landing gear on top, it’ll probably be their last landing. Aerobatic performer and Hollywood actor Craig Hosking has done it, many times! For a while, Hosking, who has been busy making movies of late (most recently on 2017’s Dunkirk), made inverted landings in his Pitts biplane specially outfitted with landing gear on both top and bottom. Thanks all the same, but we’ll avoid that plane if it shows up on the line at our flying club! Some temptations one does not need! 

12. Boosting A Disabled Airplane

To our knowledge, this has been done just once, in March of 1967 during the Vietnam War, when an American pilot, Captain Robert Pardo, used the canopy of his McDonnell Douglas F-4, suffering damage from anti-aircraft fire, to help extend the flight time of another F-4. To do this, Pardo positioned his jet beneath the other and used his canopy to push up on the extended tailhook of the other jet, flown by Captain Earl Aman. The maneuver, known as “Pardo’s Push,” succeeded in getting both planes into slightly less-hostile territory before they all had to bail out. Both of the pilots and both of their backseaters successfully ejected and were later rescued by U.S. forces, considerably worse for the wear but alive and soon on their way back home to be with their families.

Aviation Breakthroughs: Personal Jets

The post Famous Last Achievements in Aviation appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

Mystery

Roughly 2,000 aircraft have vanished within a 25,000-square-mile area known as the Nevada Triangle. What’s behind the mysterious disappearances, and why have most of the aircraft never been found?

Background

While much of the world has heard of the infamous and ever-mysterious Bermuda Triangle, of similar intrigue is the lesser-known, but equally fascinating, Nevada Triangle. The area is bounded by the cities of Fresno, Las Vegas and Reno, and is speckled by the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks lie beneath, and tucked along the Triangle’s edges, adding to the sense of mystery, is the super-secret government facility known as Area 51.

Around 2,000 aircraft have gone missing in the Nevada Triangle over the past 60 years. That’s approximately three disappearances a month. One of the most famous victims was legendary adventurer and pilot Steve Fossett. On the morning of September 3, 2007, Fossett took off in his Super Decathlon from a small Nevada airstrip and seemingly vanished into thin air. Search-and-rescue operations went on for weeks, costing roughly $700,000, yet Fossett was not found until over a year later, when a hiker stumbled upon his ID cards scattered along a trail. The NTSB didn’t find any mechanical issues with the aircraft, so what happened that fateful, tragic day? And why have so many other aircraft disappeared in the same area, never to be found?

Area 51

Along the eastern edge of the Nevada Triangle sits the highly classified government facility “Area 51.” According to the U.S. Air Force, the site has been used since 1955 to develop and test weapons and experimental aircraft. Remains from the Roswell crash are allegedly stored at the facility, sparking decades-long rumors that its real purpose is for studying and communicating with extraterrestrials. Security around the perimeter is extremely tight; anyone who attempts to approach will quickly notice something far more unnerving than aliens—locked-and-loaded guards ready to take them out. As such, some speculate that the real reason so many civilian aircraft have disappeared in the area is that the government has been taking down any that get too close. While it may seem a bit far-fetched, the disappearances started around the same time the facility opened.

Portals

According to Albert Einstein, space and time are woven together, forming a smooth four-dimensional fabric known as “spacetime.” A recent study by NASA proved that Einstein wasn’t only correct, but also that the spacetime vortex surrounding Earth is distorted due to the spinning motion of the planet. Some fringe theorists have posited a rift has occurred in the fabric, causing small portals to open up in specific areas around the world, such as the Bermuda and Nevada Triangles. However, there has been no proof to date of such a rift, and the questions of where these portals lead to and why they would have been formed in these specific locations have never been answered.

Pilot Error

Flying through the tall, beautiful peaks of the Sierra Nevadas is an amazing, awe-inducing experience as a pilot, but navigating through them safely can be tricky. The varied terrain, pop-up storm systems and often-heavy turbulence are all challenges to be reckoned with. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that at least some of the long-lost pilots, especially those lacking mountain flying experience, became overwhelmed or disoriented, with fatal results. Pilot error is the leading cause of crashes, after all.

Mountain Waves

Fast-moving winds off the nearby Pacific Ocean frequently push through the steep mountain sides, producing a phenomenon known as mountain waves. A pilot encountering this phenomenon may go from straight-and-level flight to essentially riding an invisible up-and-down (or just down) roller coaster. The downdrafts produced by mountain waves are frequently strong and forceful, posing an extreme hazard to pilots. Hundreds of feet can quickly be lost, and some mountain waves and lee winds are strong enough to overpower the ability of a light plane to keep from getting pancaked into the terrain below. Because of this, pilots are encouraged to maintain a high enough altitude above terrain to provide a buffer in the event downdrafts are encountered. Even some clear weather days in some Sierra locations are unflyable.

Conclusion

If you’re out of tin foil, worry not—the mystery of the Nevada Triangle can be reasonably explained without government conspiracies or spacetime portals at play. The bulk of these disappearances are likely attributed to a combination of pilot error, challenging terrain and unexpected, fast-changing weather phenomenon. In Fossett’s case, the NTSB concluded that he encountered a significant downdraft of ~400 mph, far too strong for his Decathlon to overcome.

As for why so many of the crash sites are never located, that’s probably because of the complex, rugged and mountainous nature of the terrain and its overlying vegetation. During the search for Fossett, eight other crash sites were found. So chances are they’re all out there—cloaked somewhere down within the peaks and valleys of the Sierra Nevada’s always-imposing and occasionally downright hostile terrain.

The post Mysteries of Flight: The Nevada Triangle appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.