Upon his retirement as a non-routine flight operations captain from a fractional operator in 2015, Dr. Veillette had accumulated more than 20,000 hours of flight experience in 240 types of aircraft—including balloons, rotorcraft, sea plans, glides, war birds, supersonic jets and large commercial transports. He is an adjunct professor at Utah Valley University. In June 2023, he won the prestigious Bill Gunston Technology Writer of the Year Award.
The accurate display of airspeed information at high altitude is vital because the margins between the low-speed and high-speed buffet margins can be thin.
Although transport aircraft have three independent speed-sensing systems, environmental factors such as high-altitude ice crystals have the potential to remove this redundancy and create simultaneous failures.
