Peter Garrison

The pilot, 65, had 33,000 hours. He had retired six years earlier as a 777 captain after a 36-year career in airline flying. He was a CFI-I and ATP 
with ratings in a slew of Boeing and Lockheed types, and was an air-frame and power-plant mechanic to boot. He and some family members had flown […]

My father was handsome. He had the Paul Newman look and knew it. He came over here from Germany in 1936. He said that he taught himself English, starting on the Red Star Line steamer, by reading The Forsyte Saga. I found that a little hard to believe, but, however he did it, he eventually […]

The following is an edited transcript of communications between 
Colorado Springs Approach Control and Tower and the pilot of a Mooney M20E arriving on an IFR flight plan from Rapid City, South Dakota. 869: Springs Approach, Mooney 79869, checking in 10,000 with Sierra. APP: 
 Mooney 79869, Springs Approach, 
expect an ILS Runway 17L. 869: […]

Early this year my son, who was screening a series of classic films for friends, put on the 1981 Spielberg pulse-pounder Raiders of the Lost Ark, which came out in the year he was born and, therefore, stood to him, in terms of the history of film and the decline of taste, as Casablanca does […]

Cash prizes have been big motivators in aviation. The first flights across the Atlantic, the first man-powered flight, the first flight into space by a nongovernmental program — to name a few — were brought about, or at the very least hurried along, by the lure of a big payday. Not to say that honor […]

The rudder travel limiter of the Indonesia AirAsia Airbus A320 began acting up in January 2014. Attempts to fix it were unsuccessful, and failures became increasingly frequent. In the course of 74 flights between December 19 and December 27, 2014, the airplane’s electronic centralized aircraft monitoring system, or ECAM, reported more than 30 faults. Many […]

As you probably know, the movie The Martian concerns an astronaut who gets stranded on Mars and contrives to survive there until rescuers can come to get him. It has a kind of Potemkin village verisimilitude: a facade of scientific-sounding talk concealing ramshackle structures of crossed fingers and nonsense. Screenwriters are not under oath, but unfortunately […]

The airport at Los Alamos, New Mexico, lies on a mesa with ravines on three sides and rising terrain to the west. The 6,000-foot runway, 7,200 feet above sea level, is oriented east-west, with a slight upslope to the west. Because of the noise sensitivities of a community just beyond the departure end of Runway […]

“The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was Scaled Composites’ failure to consider and protect against the possibility that a single human error could result in a catastrophic hazard to the SpaceShipTwo vehicle. This failure set the stage for the copilot’s premature unlocking of the feather system as a […]

“This is 176, we’re coming in over Cape Cod descending, we have a magnetic chip detector light, we’d like to declare an emergency — and we’re heading for home plate.” It was August 1978. One seventy-six was a Grumman US-2B Tracker, a Navy utility plane nicknamed “Stoof” from the type designation of one common model, […]