Peter Garrison

A Navion crash in November 2016 could have been avoided by breaking an old habit.

Writing last month’s Aftermath column about a fatal accident that resulted from the pilot’s mishandling of a balked landing, I reflected that I had never assessed the behavior of my own airplane in that maneuver. As I have said before, my idea of flight testing is to take trips and wait for something strange to […]

In August 2015, a Florence, South Carolina, doctor, 51, left his home field early in the morning on a vacation trip whose eventual destination was the Grand Canyon.

A go-around from a full-flap approach is a delicate maneuver that pilots are seldom called upon to perform.

My mother, who fortified herself for any aerial voyage with either Miltown or Chivas Regal, would later revisit with perverse relish each “air pocket” the plane had encountered. I’m not sure what she believed an air pocket consisted of, but I suppose it was something like the “region of low pressure causing an aircraft to […]

A northeast wind is picking up. Two red-tailed hawks are circling above this ridge, rising higher and higher, sliding fast when they turn southward but seeming to hover in place when they face north. Each surge and billow lifts them higher. They must soar for pleasure; they’re so far up now, no likely prey would […]

“Hinge moment” is the technical name for the force required to deflect a control surface. In small, relatively slow airplanes, hinge moments are not very large; pilots move the controls with ease. But as control surfaces get larger and speeds get higher, hinge moments grow rapidly. They increase with the chord length of the control […]

Do you know the difference between civil twilight, nautical twilight and astronomical twilight?

In May 2016, I met a woman named Susan Mozena. When she learned that I fly, she told me her father, Charles d’Olive, had been an ace with five victories in World War I. My first thought was that my friend Javier Arango would have gotten a kick out of my having had a close […]

A Missouri businessman, 54, and his dog, who accompanied him everywhere, died when his Piper Cherokee Six broke up in flight over Cuba, Missouri, in 2015. The 1,200-hour pilot had filed an instrument flight plan from Branson, Missouri, where he had a vacation home, northeastward to St. Louis. He was cruising at 5,000 feet. When […]