With the announcement on Friday that the sequester-driven closures of hundreds of contract control towers was off, we might be tempted to pat ourselves on the back for our hard work in fighting the misguided judgment of the administration.

Everybody knows that new light airplanes cost too much and don’t do enough. This might be changing. And in this case, change is definitely good.

 

Part of the problem is our history, but it’s time to let go of the past. The Part-23-view of what makes for a safe light airplane is hopelessly out of date. If the point is to make the economics of building affordable new light airplanes impossible, then today’s Part 23 regulations have come close to achieving their goal.

The news of the bombings at the Boston Marathon yesterday hit me hard. Though I was safe at home in Austin working, I had a close connection to the events. In fact, I had a number of close connections.

 

When the news came in that there had been explosions near the finish line and that this was an act of terror, my thoughts turned immediately to my friends, more than half a dozen of whom were running the event. Were they okay? Had any of their loved ones been injured? Were there going to be more bombs? I was beside myself.

“Pilotage” — the word spoken by my primary flight instructor, retired F-4 instructor Si Campbell, as if it were a spell. It was, he said, the complex art of figuring out where you are by reference to your surroundings. Knowing where you are from the air might sound easy to those non-pilots dwelling between 5 and 6 feet agl, but it doesn’t take many minutes to realize that at altitude, things look very different than they do on the ground. Without navaids, getting lost in the air isn’t just easy to do; it’s almost impossible to avoid.