I had just finished washing and drying Windbird’s hull and was just about to begin applying her annual coat of wax when my cellphone rang, startling me. I checked the number—my airline’s crew scheduling department—and my heart made a little leap of joy. This is not my normal reaction to a call from crew sked, […]
It was a bright spring day at Flight Level 350, far above the Chesapeake Bay, as we cruised up the Eastern Seaboard en route to Newark, New Jersey. This was my first time flying a jet in more than a month—really flying, not playacting in a giant video game on hydraulic stilts ensconced in the […]
It was a blindingly bright afternoon on the edge of the Okavango Delta—warm and sunny on this July winter day. Our Land Rover Defender chugged along the dirt track that paralleled and crisscrossed a reedy canal, occasionally turning muddled and confused among a profusion of game trails trampled through the ocher sea of grass by […]
It’s a beautiful late-fall day: warm and clear with a hint of breeze, a cherished last vestige of summer this time of year in the Pacific Northwest. “The Mountain is out,” as the locals say—the mountain in question being Rainier—and its 25 glaciers glittered in the sun as we made our way across the Tacoma […]
Once every year or two, I have a peculiar and memorable dream while I sleep. I am quite sure I’m not alone among pilots—and likely among mere mortals as well—in occasionally dreaming that I’m flying. I don’t mean flying in an aircraft or manipulating the controls—although I have those dreams too. I mean bird dreams, […]
The six-cylinder, 310-hp Continental growls and pops as I line up on Runway 7L then builds to a throaty roar as I open the throttle. I feed it in slowly, just like Joe told me to, in order to keep this Lancair with its castoring nosewheel, tiny tail and monstrous torque pointed straight down the […]
It was a gorgeous morning on the Florida Panhandle: The cold-front storms of the previous night had scoured out the scud and haze, and the Gulf of Mexico sparkled brilliantly under my left wing. I banked a little to the right, easing inland from the hotel-lined beach, as I eyed the Pensacola airport a few […]
The sad saga of the Boeing 737 Max has been a slow-burning corporate, engineering, regulatory, human-interest and public-relations nightmare for going on six months now—with no end in sight. The magnitude of Boeing’s deadly foul-up is a frequent topic of conversation in airliner cockpits, and considerable ink has been spilled over the subject in both […]
I’ve been both a pilot and sailor going on 25 years, but only in the past five years have I taken to regularly crossing large bodies of water on the wing and under sail. Our “small world” gets a whole lot bigger when one traverses the great expanses of salt water that make up 71 […]
Because I’m both an airplane nut and history buff, many of my European work layovers involve either seeking out aerial adventures or investigating some bit of the 2,000 years of tumultuous history that seem to lurk around the continent’s every corner. Often, I am able to combine these interests—for a great deal of aviation history […]
