International

Don’t Open the Door to Error, Safety Has no Safecuts  I was sitting in the cockpit, waiting for the ground crew to fuel my plane. Right then a pickup truck arrived with a hard stop, dragging its tires. Its driver jumped out and rushed to me. His eyes were bloodshot...

Someone arriving at Fazenda Mário Ferreira might think he or she was suddenly transported to somewhere in Iowa or Kansas. It doesn't look like a typical Brazilian farm, situated around crop-covered gentle hills with grain elevators visible in the distance, with an asphalt road well into the impeccably clean farming...

By James Williams, FAA What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever been through in an airplane? For me, pretty much every one of those stories involves weather. Even though my weather gambles paid off, they are still seared into my memory as moments where my life, and in my experiences, the...

Most of the articles I have presented are focused on best practices. I can share the information, but it is up to each engine owner to do what they want with it. All I can do is lay out a path for success. When things start to go in the...

“Just can’t wait to get on the road again…Goin' places that I've never been…” - Willie Nelson. At the beginning of each season, your ag aviation business undergoes a period of readjustment to get all the kinks out of the operation from receipt of order to finished job. It just...

The NDN-6 Fieldmaster - Part II By 1995, the Fieldmaster program was essentially over. Owner Andrew MacKinnon and the current company he headed, EPA Aircraft, found themselves with a product they could not produce nor sell. Andrew had also run out of working contracts for the aircraft, so they were...

Situated a short 60 miles away from the Motor City on the Canadian side of the Detroit River, Zimmer Air Services Inc (ZASI) has been in the aerial application business for over 40 years and currently runs a fleet of fixed and rotary wing aircraft.  We caught up with Operations...

Unworkable and inconsistent regulations are making agricultural spraying near-impossible in some areas, says the New Zealand Agricultural Aviation Association (NZAAA). A number of regional and district councils around the country are reviewing their long-term plans and proposing some changes which affect those who use planes and helicopters to spread fertiliser....

The volume of fertiliser applied from aircraft halved last year and applications from ground spreaders were back about a third. Initial data released by the New Zealand Agricultural Aviation Association and the Civil Aviation Authority shows the volume of solid and liquid fertiliser applied by fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters in...

By Ryan Varjassy The NDN-6 Fieldmaster was the brainchild of British aviation legend Nigel Desmond Norman, starting in the mid-1970s. Desmond and his college friend and business partner, John Britten, formed a relationship in the 1950s at the De Havilland Technical School, where they studied aircraft design. In 1954, the...