Lane Wallace

I don’t remember where the two men came from. I don’t even really remember what they looked like. But I remember the question. The three of us were sitting on barstools at a Key West, Florida, watering hole, making our way through a couple of requisite local margaritas and telling tales of flying and adventure. […]

“If we don’t start moving soon,” I find myself thinking as my frustration simmers into overboil, “I swear to God I’m going to scream.” I’m sitting in the middle of the I-580 freeway, which currently looks more like a big valet parking lot that just happens to be four traffic lanes wide. I’ve been on […]

It’s said that the good lord protects children and fools. Perhaps that explains it. For on some level, Clark Seaborn, Hank Galpin, Gary Underland and Ron Hackworth all know they must be fools. Who else, after all, would take on the challenge of taking a few scraps of rotting wood and twisted metal from planes […]

It was supposed to be such an easy flight. Oh, there was some weather that was supposed to move in that evening, but I’d called Flight Service five minutes before leaving for the airport, and they’d told me it was clear below 12,000 feet, with 10 miles visibility all along my route. And forecast to […]

Neither the acting nor the writing would win an Academy Award. “Well gosh, Wilbur, how come you get to be interviewed? I’m the one who flew it!” pouts a blond middle-school student with magic-marker facial hair. “Hey. Orville. Who’s older?” retorts his “brother,” a lanky, brown-haired 13-year-old. “You are.” “So who do you think is […]

My Jeppesen Private Pilot Manual tells student pilots that radio communication is very serious stuff. “When speaking on the radio,” the good book says, “it is important to speak in a professional manner. Radio transmissions should be as brief as possible to help avoid frequency congestion. Incorrect radio procedures can compromise your safety and the […]

The late September rain is pounding on the fuselage above me and coursing across the narrow, rectangular windscreen that sits less than a foot in front of my face. The frigid Alaskan ocean lies only 400 feet beneath us, but if we went any higher, we’d be in the clouds-clouds that are obscuring a line […]

||| |—|—| | | | The morning was still clear and cool when I pushed the Cheetah’s throttle forward and lifted off from Runway one-four at Santa Rosa. At first it was a takeoff like any other I’d had with the plane, and I let out a sigh of relief at finally being off on […]

I don’t know his name, and I didn’t quite catch his N-number. But somewhere in the San Francisco area, there’s a pilot who owes me an apology. I was flying my Cheetah down to the Oakland International Airport on July 4th to pick up a friend who was flying in for a visit. It was […]

||| |—|—| | | | A man approached me in the Flying tent at the EAA’s AirVenture airshow last summer and thanked me for, as he put it, “working a miracle in my life.” He explained that his wife, who in 20 years of marriage had never been willing to go flying with him, had […]