It does not feel like spring yet but the calendar promises it will be here soon.  As such we will dust off the grill and prepare for the feast!  We will reconvene the Monadnock Aviation barbecues on May 17th at noon.  Hope you can make it.

Kelly Mann is a pilot from Keene, New Hampshire with big plans.  He is working on a plan to fly around the world while seeking out innovators and innovations from all corners of the earth.  The places he goes and people he meets will be guided by input from you with his entire journey to be documented on film.

Kelly is an engineering student at Purdue University and co-ops with NASA.  This bright young, local aviator will integrate technology, aviation, and real world problem solving into one big adventure.  His plan is to start small with a "test-flight" on the east coast to promote the project and help secure funding, scale up to an American flight, and then the world is his oyster!  

Please take a look at his website (www.theworldsflight.com).  I hope he finds an abundance of support in the local aviation community. 

Keene's Runway 2/20 rehabilitation project is coming this spring.  The current runway was constructed in 1989.  The project will include the reclaiming of existing pavement followed by resurfacing.  The construction method to be used will actually double the pavement strength.  Also included in the project will be upgrades to a number of airfield signs and taxiway lights.  A culvert under the runway at the south end of the airport will be extended to improve the safety area too.  Finally, the project will include the construction of a new taxilane from the existing terminal apron to hangar development sites on the east side of the terminal and a new wind cone/segmented circle. 

 

Due to the nature of work, the runway will be closed during construction - scheduled to take 45 days.  Runway 14/32 will remain open except when the intersection work is completed.  During the intersection work, both runways will be closed.  The intersection work is expected to take between 7 to 10 days. 

 

Runway 2-20 will close on May 12^th and remain closed until the completion of the project. 

You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter for updates on the project and runway conditions.

Have you checked out the FAA Wings Pilot Proficiency Program lately?  Take a look at this list of mostly FREE courses designed to keep you thinking and make you a safer pilot.  In some cases it can even satisfy the requirements for a flight review.  It will take a few minutes to register and learn the program but it is a treasure trove of information which may save your life. 

Every so often, usually in the vast deserts of the American Southwest, a hiker or a backpacker will run across something puzzling: a large concrete arrow, as much as seventy feet in length, sitting in the middle of scrub-covered nowhere. What are these giant arrows? It's the Transcontinental Air Mail Route.

 

 

On August 20, 1920, the United States opened its first coast-to-coast airmail delivery route, just 60 years after the Pony Express closed up shop. There were no good aviation charts in those days, so pilots had to eyeball their way across the country using landmarks. This meant that flying in bad weather was difficult, and night flying was just about impossible.

 

The Postal Service solved the problem with the world's first ground-based civilian navigation system: a series of lit beacons that would extend from New York to San Francisco. Every ten miles, pilots would pass a bright yellow concrete arrow. Each arrow would be surmounted by a 51-foot steel tower and lit by a million-candlepower rotating beacon. (A generator shed at the tail of each arrow powered the beacon.)

 

Now mail could get from the Atlantic to the Pacific not in a matter of weeks, but in just 30 hours or so. Even the dumbest of air mail pilots, it seems, could follow a series of bright yellow arrows straight out of a Tex Avery cartoon.

 

By 1924, just a year after Congress funded it, the line of giant concrete markers stretched from Rock Springs, Wyoming to Cleveland, Ohio. The next summer, it reached all the way to New York, and by 1929 it spanned the continent uninterrupted, the envy of postal systems worldwide.

 

Radio and radar are, of course, infinitely less cool than a concrete Yellow Brick Road from sea to shining sea, but I think we all know how this story ends. New advances in communication and navigation technology made the big arrows obsolete, and the Commerce Department decommissioned the beacons in the 1940s.

 

The steel towers were torn down and went to the war effort. But the hundreds of arrows remain. Their yellow paint is gone, their concrete cracks a little more with every winter frost, and no one crosses their path much, except for coyotes and tumbleweeds. But they're still out there.