Test Pilot

1. They are nicknamed the Doomsday Planes. What are they?
2. True or false? During aviation’s days of yore, pilots flying aircraft without flaps lost excess altitude on final approach by executing a series of alternate-direction spin entries and recoveries.
3. From reader Charles Baumann: When would the crew of a jetliner see a rubber jungle?
4. The earliest application of an exhaust-driven turbocharger occurred in
   A. 1908.
   B. 1918.
   C. 1928.
   D. 1938.
5. From reader John Schmidt: In 1959 police were called to the racially segregated library in Lake City, South Carolina, because a 9-year-old child, Ronald McNair, refused to leave without being allowed to borrow books. What happened to this defiant African American?
6. True or false? In military aviation, a sortie usually is a combat mission consisting of two aircraft.
7. From reader Boom Powell: Gliding in a glider is descending and soaring in one implies ascending (in rising air). When was the first official soaring flight?
8. A turbocharged airplane is parked with its engine shut down on an airport with an elevation of 300 feet msl at a time when the altimeter setting is 29.72 inches and the ambient temperature is 0 degrees C. What is the indicated manifold pressure?
   A. 29.42 inches
   B. 29.62 inches
   C. 29.72 inches
   D. 30.02 inches

Test Pilot Answers

1. These are four Boeing E–4Bs, Boeing 747s modified to serve as command and control centers during war and to survive a nuclear blast or an electromagnetic pulse. They are considered the best way to protect the president, and an E–4B follows whenever the president travels abroad.
2. True. Called a falling leaf, the maneuver was executed by holding the aircraft in a stall and entering and recovering from a series of incipient spins in alternate directions. When viewed from ahead, the airplane appears to be falling like a leaf.
3. Rubber jungle is a term used by airline crewmembers to describe the effect created when oxygen masks are deployed throughout the cabin from above passenger seats and dangle at the ends of their rubber hoses.
4. The correct answer is B. This is when General Electric turbocharged a Liberty engine that produced more power atop Pike’s Peak in Colorado (14,110 feet msl) than at sea level. This led to a 1920 altitude record of 33,000 feet.
5. McNair earned a doctorate in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became an expert in laser physics, and was the second African American to fly in space. He perished in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, and the library is named after him.
6. False. A sortie involves a single aircraft. Sortie originated from the French verb, sortir, which means to go out.
7. Orville Wright began the sport and science of soaring when he soared for 9 minutes 45 seconds over Kill Devil Hill on October 24, 1911, a record that stood for almost 10 years.
8. The correct answer is A. With the engine shut down, a manifold pressure gauge acts as a barometer and indicates ambient atmospheric pressure, which—in this case—is 29.72 inches minus 0.30 inches, or 29.42 inches. Temperature is not relevant.