Martha Lunken

(March 2011) TOSSING OBJECTS FROM flying machines, stuff like flour bombs, candy, inflated balloons, the ashes of friends, rolls of toilet paper and Tootsie Pop wrappers (yeah, I know that’s tacky), an art reserved to pilots of relatively simple, unpressurized airplanes, is surely one of flying’s greatest joys. C’mon, what kind of fun can you […]

(February 2011) — When we shoved open the door of the disreputable little shack, six, maybe seven, pairs of eyes swung in our direction and their expressions read, “Either these two are lost or they just arrived from another planet.” In our pastel wool winter coats, white gloves, pumps and those little lace veils women […]

(January 2010) — My medical’s due next month and I’m mindful of one of the rules of flying: “The medical profession is the natural enemy of the aviation profession.” But we’re lucky to have good choices around here, and I’m actually dithering about which of three to call for an appointment. These are good physicians […]

I’m essentially a little airplane pilot, and only rarely have I “flown far out across the prairies of the sky to lands my fathers never knew and shores my kindred never trod,” but I think any pilot understands Gill Robb Wilson’s feelings about flying home for Christmas: I’ve blessed my wings a thousand times For […]

Maybe I’m hung up on stories about flying ridiculously close to the bottom edge of the air (aka “the ground”) but some are just too improbable and too whacko to be lost in the FAA’s big computer in Plano, Texas. Most complaints to the feds involve real or imaginary low-flying objects — airplanes, lawn chairs, […]

After he “aced” the ground (oral) portion of a private check ride I gave last week, this young man pointed the airplane in approximately the right direction, found a couple of checkpoints and made a reasonable guess about our time to the next one listed on his flight log sheet. This with benefit of a […]

My balloon career launched modestly (sort of) when a delightful, brilliant, eccentric friend named Frank Wood decided he had to have a balloon for fun and to promote his rather outrageous WEBN radio station in Cincinnati. He built it and aired a classical music format until son Beau convinced him that wouldn’t “fly” and they […]

In the early ’60s, when I went wrong and started hanging out at the aerodrome, common wisdom was that the DC-3, while a grand old airplane, had outlived its usefulness to the military, the airlines and even corporate operators. Its death knell was tolling to signal the time had come to relegate these antiques to […]

Please Plan on Attending” was the subject line in an e-mail from Marty Bevill at Wapakoneta airport (“Wapak” to the locals) about 100 miles north of Cincinnati. Officially AXV, it’s the Neil Armstrong Airport at New Knoxville in Auglaize County, nestled in mid-Ohio farm country south of Lima. The airport namesake grew up in Wapak […]

When a private-pilot applicant around here can’t scare up another examiner and is desperate enough to call me for a practical test, I tell him (for me, that means male, female or unknown) to plan a flight any place he wants to go … well, someplace that’s at least a couple of hundred miles away. […]