Lane Wallace

Most pilots know Sporty’s for its famous “Pilot Shop” mail-order pilot supply business. But for more than 20 years, Sporty’s has been not only a place where you can buy “Learn to Fly Here!” signs, but also a place where aspiring pilots can learn to fly. Sporty’s founder and chairman, Hal Shevers, was a flight […]

I don’t know who came up with the idea of the advertising jingle. But whoever it was, they were clearly some kind of demonic genius. How else to explain the fact that even now, more than 30 years since those rainy fall mornings when I’d listen to the radio as I got ready for school, […]

Back in 1989, businessman Wally David made an interesting observation: Computer graphics technology was improving so dramatically that a whole new realm of simulator training was about to become possible. With the new graphics technology, a non-moving Flight Training Device (FTD) might be able to provide a realistic sensation of movement simply by incorporating high-quality, […]

Rich Karlgaard is a late bloomer. At least, in terms of aviation. “I never had an itch to fly until I read a New York Times Sunday Magazine piece called “Turn Left at Cloud 109″ by James Fallows, which appeared on Thanksgiving weekend in 1999,” says Karlgaard. “It was about Cirrus. A couple of days […]

Part of my rationale, when I plunked my entire financial nest egg down to buy my 1977 Grumman Cheetah, over 10 years ago, was that I was buying a durable good. An asset that would probably hold or increase its value over time, so that if I ever needed some extra cash, I could sell […]

It’s funny, the things that stick. Every day, people make comments to me. Whole conversations ensue. Years and years of words, sentences, stories and dissertations pile up in the mental “in” box. Yet out of all those words, only a few lines, jokes, pieces of advice or phrases actually imprint clearly enough on the internal […]

“This is my friend Lane. She flew in from Northern California for the party.” The speaker is my friend Tony, an entertainment lawyer and manager in Los Angeles, as he introduces me to the host and various other guests at the holiday party we’re attending. A party, I might add, at the Malibu beach house […]

No one at the Lockheed Skunk Works would ever have envisioned the U-2 still being the cutting-edge platform for Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions more than half a century after its first flight. But over the years, the Air Force has invested close to $2 billion on enhancements to both the airplane […]

For all the fuss made about California’s huge population, almost two-thirds of its 36.5 million people are squeezed into just 8 percent of the land. That leaves an awful lot of open spaces in between, as anyone who’s ever flown — or driven — between San Francisco and Los Angeles can attest. But my friend […]

Twelve months ago, Embraer’s first “clean-sheet” business jet design — the Phenom 100 — had just completed its first test flights. What a difference 12 months can make! Today, the Phenom is just one of four … count them, four … “clean-sheet” Executive Jet designs in development at Embraer. Currently, the Phenom 100 is finishing […]