Test Pilot

1. Which one or more of the following was (were) the original founder(s) of the Travel Air Manufacturing Company of Wichita, Kansas, in 1925?A. Walter Beech
   B. William Boeing
   C. Clyde Cessna
   D. Lloyd Stearman
2. True or false? Most of those aboard the last flight of the Hindenburg survived.
3. What was the first transatlantic airline flight conducted in a landplane (as compared to a flying boat)?
4. What did Jiro Horikoshi, Willy Messerschmitt, Reginald Mitchell, and Edgar Schmued have in common?
5. True or false? When writing The High and the Mighty, Ernest Gann should have had the stricken DC–4 airliner divert from its Honolulu/San Francisco route to a more southerly route to Los Angeles, which would have reduced the en route distance.
6. The sun reaches its maximum northerly position over the Earth when it is directly above the Tropic of Cancer (23.5 degrees north latitude) on the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. This is south of every place in the 48 states. Why, then, must a pilot look northwest (and not southwest) to view the sunset on at least this day from any place in the 48 states?
7. From reader John Schmidt: On August 16, 1942, a Navy blimp piloted by Lt. Earnest Cody and Ensign Charles Adams had been patrolling for Japanese submarines off the coast of California. It then crash-landed on a residential street in Daly City. Why was the aircraft thereafter known as the “Ghost Blimp?”
8. Skymasters were manufactured by _____ at the beginning of World War II, but _____ did not manufacture them until 1961.

Test Pilot Answers

1. The correct answers are A, C, and D. Travel Air soon became one of America’s leading aircraft manufacturers. In 1927, however, Clyde Cessna and Lloyd Stearman left to form their own companies. Travel Air merged with the Curtiss-Wright Corp. in 1929, and Walter Beech left in 1932 to form Beech Aircraft.
2. True; 62 of the 97 people aboard escaped from the flaming airship.
3. On October 23, 1945, American Export Airlines, a subsidiary of American Airlines, inaugurated service from New York to London in a Douglas DC–4 with refueling stops in Gander, Newfoundland, and Shannon, Ireland.
4. They were responsible for designing their countries’ best World War II fighters: the Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero, the Messerschmitt Bf 109 (Me109), the Supermarine Spitfire, and the North American F–51 Mustang, respectively.
5. False. SFO is 137 nautical miles closer to Honolulu (HNL) than is LAX.
6. When viewing the setting sun, we look in a direction along a great-circle route toward that point on the Earth’s surface over which the sun is directly located. Such a great-circle “route” makes it appear as though the sun is north of our position, even though it is not.
7. The landing was made without anyone aboard; the crew had vanished without a trace. Their parachutes were on board, their radio was operative, and the engines and all aircraft systems operated normally.
8. The Douglas C–54 Skymaster was the military variant of the four-engine DC–4, and Cessna’s Skymasters were the twin-engine, “push-me, pull-you” models 336 (fixed landing gear) and 337 (retractable gear).