Peter Garrison

Congress created the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1915 “to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight with a view to their practical solution.” What would eventually become the world’s largest and most productive aeronautical-research establishment began as a committee of 12 unpaid men with a budget of $5,000 per […]

When their equipment doesn’t work, pilots need to work a little harder.

The airspeed indicator may be the oldest and most fundamental of the flight instruments, but it is also the one least suited to its job, which is primarily not to tell us how fast we are going but rather where we are in the flight envelope. It is pleasant to know, as we cruise along, […]

The accident report highlights the ­culture of omertà among professional pilots that keeps them from blowing the whistle on incompetent or unsafe colleagues.

In December 1996, a pilot and his companion checked out a Beech T-34 Mentor from the flying club at the Memphis Naval Air Station in Millington, Tennessee. They departed at about 4:15 in the afternoon on a 300-nautical-mile trip to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. By the time they approached the Gulf Coast, it was dark. […]

Between an inherent tendency to procrastinate, an expectation of lowering prices and a faint hope that the 2020 deadline would—like an affordable substitute for leaded avgas—quietly recede into the indefinite future, I did nothing about ADS-B Out until late this past year. By then, it appeared that the deadline was inexorable and the hoped-for $49.95 […]

A questionable takeoff in fog by the pilot of a Cessna 340 ends in tragedy.

Despite the complaints we often hear about the “outdated” technology of opposed-piston engines, the industry has found nothing decisively better with which to propel smaller airplanes. Not for lack of trying: The history of small aircraft engines—in fact, of engines in general—is a freaks’ graveyard. There have been barrel-shaped engines, spherical engines, cubical engines and […]

Every afternoon my partner Nancy and I walk around Echo Park Lake. Two miles from ­downtown Los Angeles, it is not Walden Pond. It is man-made, cement lined, ­shallow and ringed by a paved walk on which multicolored streams of ­people, old and young, some ­strolling, some rolling, flow in at least two directions, maybe more. On […]

They aren’t the only ones who have been led astray by incorrect expectations in IMC.