Peter Garrison

A pilot with a shocking disregard for personal safety comes to his inevitable demise.

The first free flight of a manned balloon took place, as is well known, in France. The king, who took an interest in the experiments of the Montgolfier brothers, suggested that the passengers on the first manned flight should be two convicts, whom he considered expendable. He was persuaded, however, that the honor of being […]

In 1945, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, precursor of NASA and source of much of our knowledge about practical aerodynamics, published a hefty compendium of airfoil data, NACA Technical Report 824, which later appeared in book form under the title Theory of Wing Sections. The names of the authors, Abbott and von Doenhoff, have […]

Maintenance techs aren’t required to be pilots or aerodynamicists.

I have been inclined to class electric airliners, along with personal jet packs, among the consumer products that will always be almost here. My estimates of the likely future, however, have almost an inverse predictive value: If I say something is utterly impracticable, it will very likely be for sale at Walmart next year. The […]

Jean-Claude was in the left seat. He was senior to me, but I was flying. We were near the equator, where Mermoz and Guillaumet had once flown — but they, poor fellows, had not been at 35,000 feet! We entered the clouds at what looked like a soft spot in a squall line. At first […]

The 225-hour commercial pilot, 55, had built his JD-2 Dyke Delta in St. Louis and, after several test flights there, took it to Safford, Arizona. Originally intended as a roadable aircraft, the JD-2 had folding wings and sufficiently springy main gear and large tires to allow it to be towed behind a car. It made […]

Do you believe your backside or your lyin’ eyes?

Someone once suggested that if you want to know how you would feel crossing an ocean in a single-engine airplane, you should just fly out to sea for a couple of hours and then turn around and come back. There’s something about being out of sight of land that, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson’s remark about […]

“There are those who have flown them and those who have not, and it is idle for the former to try to explain matters to the latter.” A Vickers Supermarine test pilot, Jeffrey Quill, was talking about the Walrus, an amphibious biplane flying boat designed in 1929 by RJ Mitchell, who a few years later […]