Hominid Views

Via King 5:

Seattle-bound Flight 68 was approaching takeoff speed when the eagle was ingested into the left engine shortly after 10 a.m. in Sitka. None of the 134 passengers or five crew members was hurt.
“We were roaring down the runway and about the time they’d be picking the nose up, we hear a big kaboom,” [...]

This video of the flight of the Solar Impulse is mesmerizingly beautiful.

You can watch the first night flight of the Solar Impulse live here. With its first night flight behind it, the Solar Impulse will soon attempt to be the first plane to fly around the world on solar power.
I [...]

After vanishing last October in his little Taylorcraft airplane, a missing pilot has been found:

Authorities have discovered a crashed plane near Shelton, and they believe the pilot’s remains are also at the scene.
Mason County investigators said brush pickers on Friday found the crashed 1946 two-seater Taylorcraft. Detectives have confirmed the plane is the aircraft Gordon [...]

The USA Today article seems to be trying for outrage in stating:

Nearly half of the $55.6 billion that has gone to airports in the 28-year-old Airport Improvement Program has gone to airports used exclusively or mostly by private planes. That includes $1.5 billion since 2001 for specific projects, known as earmarks, requested by members of [...]

An airport called Souther Field has been renamed to Jimmy Carter Regional Airport:

An airport about 20 miles from Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains has been named after the 39th president despite some people opposing the change.
Souther Field Airport in Americus was renamed Jimmy Carter Regional Airport on Sunday.
The Americus City Council and Sumter County Board [...]

My airplane has been in the shop for a couple of weeks getting a minor overhaul of one cylinder (among other things). It was ready to fly today. After a “top end” overhaul, the engine manufacturer specifies a break-in program that involves several hours of continuous flying while sequencing through [...]

What a horrible way to go!
Shortly after moving to the Seattle area 10 years ago, a neighbor friend and I rented a plane and went flying around the area. I was at the controls when a twin-engine plane came screaming toward us, seemingly out of nowhere. An evasive maneuver was required [...]

Update: And here is some footage of Walter Cronkite covering the event:

Over half a million views in three days! Now this is a novel way of getting a big company to listen to your grievance:

Gosh…even hyper-partisan me thinks this is a silly idea:

At Wednesday’s Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board meeting, chairman H.R. Crawford – a former District Council member and Marion Barry confidante – told fellow Board members that he has heard talk on Capitol Hill about yanking former President Ronald Reagan’s name off the local airport and returning [...]

The New York Times Magazine has this short & sassy interview with the second human to walk on the moon, Buzz Aldrin. Here is a snippet:

What sort of music do you like?
I just did a rap session with Snoop Dogg and a rap composition called “Rocket Experience.” It’s going to be an online [...]

It was another gorgeous day in the Pacific Northwest. I spent the afternoon flying around the southern and eastern perimeters of the Olympic Mountain Range.
Here are a few pictures from a particularly scenic part of the flight, just north of Seal Rock, Washington.
This is looking east toward the [...]

ABC News covers the latest debris reports from Air France flight 447.
And then, sandwiched between a quote by Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on the country’s determination to recover the wreckage, and a quote by France’s accident investigation agency head, Paul-Louis Arslanian, on how this is France’s worst ever aviation accident, comes [...]

Today was a spectacular, sunny day, so I went out flying in the mountains just to the east of my home in Redmond, WA. Here are a few images (click for a larger version).
This is somewhere just east of Skykomish, WA, looking south, flying over U.S. 2.

And here is the view looking north.

If [...]