https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2021/april/22/aviation-writer-martha-lunkens-pilot-certificates-revoked The FAA has revoked author and Flying magazineContributing Editor Martha Lunken’s pilot certificates because she flew under a bridge in Ohio in 2020. To me the revocation seems a bit harsh and I hope she ca appeal it to a suspension for a period of time. Jimmy Lane (Google him if you don’t know his story) only received a one year suspension.
She intentionally violated multiple rules, so that's bad. And she is a former FAA Inspector, and they tend to be very harsh when one of their own does something like this. I know a former FAA Inspector who WENT TO JAIL for not reporting some medications on his medical certificate. Not kidding. Federal prison for a year or two. Also, she apparently turned off her ADS-B (although she denies it).
((She was on her way home to Cincinnati Municipal Airport/Lunken Field when “I looked over my shoulder and saw the bridge and I said out loud, ‘God, before I get too old, I have to fly under that bridge one time.’” Lunken said that “it provided no danger to anyone, but of course I knew it was illegal. But I did it anyway.”)) She's 78 and maybe 100lbs. Good for her!
But the airplane is 2500lb. But yeah, sometimes age and what not over rule rules. I would have liked living in the barnstorming era. I thought Lunken was going to be shutdown a few yrs ago and replaced with 'housing'. Flew in there during my PPL training in 1977.
Some may not know that before the jet age mandated a new airport, "Sunken Lunken" was Cincinnati's airline airport!
As I remember , the Pioneer Airmail pilots flew DH4's out of Lunken in the early 20's. Barnstormers, also.
I would hazard a guess that this was not the first time she's done that, just the first time she's been caught.
This is a little off topic but here goes anyway. Once upon a time a long time ago she was married for a while to Ebby Lunken, some 30 years her senior. Lunken Field was named after his grandfather. Ebby was one of the Cincinnati Gang of five WW2 pilots who bought and raced Ferrari's against each other in the mid to late fifties. At the 11 December 1955 Nassau Trophy Race he drove Porfirio Rubirosa's 1955 Ferrari 500 Mondial S2 (what was later to become my car for 58 years) to a first in the under two liter class. Now back to Martha... Best regards, Robert Image Unavailable, Please Login
reading her stories, for being an FAA inspector, she certainly had fun and didn't seem to love authority. I liked how she would take tp up and see how many times she could cut it down to 1,000 feet.
Honestly, most of the Inspectors I've known were also some of the biggest scofflaws. Not all of them, but many.