Peter Garrison

Of the roughly 100,000 active single-piston-engine airplanes in the FAA registry, a quarter are amateur-built. A person shopping for a used airplane might want to take a look at them. The difference between buying a factory airplane or choosing a homebuilt is something like the difference between getting a chair and getting a dog. A […]

Three-quarters of the globe behind them, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, now had only the Pacific Ocean left to cross. They took off midmorning from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on July 1, 1937, bound for Howland Island, an 8,200-foot-long, paramecium-shaped speck halfway to Honolulu. A runway had been carved out on the uninhabited […]

Some accidents arrive entirely without warning, and it is hard to know what or whom to blame.

Not all performance calculations are as specific as we think.

An adventurous pilot falls for his aircraft with fatal results.

In summer 1954, I was 10 going on 11; the “going on” part is important when you’re 10. My father was in New York for some reason or another, and my mother and I were to join him there for a month. It was the first great travel adventure of my life. Born and living […]

Uncertainty makes for an accident waiting to happen.

If you don’t know where it went, is it really gone?

I was quite young when I first fell in love with gliding. It may have been even before I fell in love with Cecilia Revilla, who sat in front of me in the fourth grade. When I say gliding, I don’t mean flying a sailplane; I was much too young for that. I mean just […]

Twenty-five years ago, a Seattle-area pilot tried to do his mother a favor. He would take her to visit a friend on the other side of the Cascades. Their route would go through the Snoqualmie Pass, which, on the day of the trip, was unfortunately beset by fog and low-lying clouds. The pilot was instrument-rated, […]