We Fly

A combination of speed and gorgeous liveries propels this piston single.

No other airplane I’ve flown can do what the SuperSTOL can. STOL, as you know, stands for “short takeoff and landing.” SuperSTOL, then, implies really short takeoffs and landings, made possible by the airplane’s huge 45-degree fowler flaps and self-deploying leading-edge slats, designs borrowed from the Helio Courier bush plane and scaled to fit this diminutive two-seat experimental amateur-built kitplane.

My first close-up experience with the effectiveness of aerial firefighting happened during the devastating Woolsey Fire in Southern California in 2018. About 1,500 homes and other structures in my neighborhood and the surrounding area were destroyed by flames in a few days. The fire started on a Thursday afternoon, and by the time the sun […]

The flagship CJ just got a whole lot better.

Clear skies, calm winds, and temperatures just far enough above the basement to enable both a pain-free walkaround and stellar engine performance greeted FLYING Magazine editor-in-chief Julie Boatman and some friends recently for the demo flight she took in the new 2022 Cirrus G6 SR, so they did what any group of pilots would do. […]

We cruise to lunch in the new 2022 SR G6 from Cirrus Aircraft, and pick up speed along the way.

Meet a single-engine, very light jet equipped with a highly detailed MFD and Perspective Touch platform.

Two larger-than-life FLYING covers grace the factory walls at the Piper Aircraft manufacturing facility in Vero Beach, Florida. The first, from March 2008, shows off the newly launched Piper Matrix, a nonpressurized version of the original PA-46 series made a little bit easier to manage by its relative lack of complexity, bringing a big-cabin feel […]

As I stood on the Textron Aviation ramp in Wichita, Kansas, for my first look at the company’s new turboprop flagship, the King Air 360, I slipped back in time to a different era and form of transportation: cars (muscle cars as they called them). My pal Lennie had just bought a brand-new, fire-engine-red Chevrolet […]

Automobiles with gull-wing doors are rare. For me, a Mercedes-Benz 300SL immediately comes to mind. Aircraft with gull-wing doors—such as the Cessna TTx and Socata Trinidad—are even rarer still, so when I first saw the Pipistrel Panthera from a distance at Chicago’s Waukegan National Airport (KUGN), I knew this airplane was something special. The company’s […]