Peter Garrison

I kept reminding myself, late last summer, that I had to let the editor of Flying‘s back page, Bethany Whitfield, know that the first article I ever wrote for Flying had appeared in the December 1965 issue, and, therefore, would qualify for mention in the “50 Years Ago” slot in the December 2015 issue. Given […]

The tiny, private dirt strip, 1,800 feet long, was way out in the boondocks. Oriented north to south, it was parallel to an ­unpaved county road and screened by a line of trees. By the other side of the strip to the east was a small crescent-shaped lake. Pine woods surrounded both, cleared for a few […]

April may have been the cruelest month in T. S. Eliot’s London, but here in Los Angeles, it’s September. On the 3rd, consequently, my wife, Nancy, and I decamped for Cape Cod. Not in my airplane. For one thing, Nancy has pretty much turned against flying. I suppose that if the “Big One” — the […]

Although the term “precision approach” merely means that vertical guidance is included, it seems to imply that the approach ought to be executed with precision by both pilots and controllers. On a December evening in 2013, a Cessna 310 carrying a pilot, 60, and his two daughters, 17 and 20, crashed while executing a missed […]

When some Connecticut boosters recently dusted off the claim that ­Gustave Whitehead, of the township of Fairfield in that great state, was “first in flight,” I, and I suspect quite a few others, emitted the sigh of jaded déjà vu. These “who was first” arguments have become pretty tedious. Predictably, the few who were stirred […]

He was, according to his obituary, an “extreme and gifted athlete” in all he tried, including distance running, snowboarding and motocross racing. He “worked hard, but played harder.” A CFI who prepared him for his Private Pilot license described him as having “very high achieving and performance traits” and as being, though a conscientious flight student, […]

Many voices crowded the advisory frequency as I approached Paso Robles, but by the time I was on the 45 the other pilots had landed and silence reigned. I landed long on 19, turned off at the end, and found a parking spot at the end of a long line of visitors to the annual […]

Both his wife and the instructor who had recommended him for his instrument rating two years earlier described the 1,500-hour pilot as thoughtful and analytical. He had “strong flying skills,” the instructor said; his wife observed that “he liked to plan ahead and have a contingency plan.” The 640 nm trip from Torrance, a southern […]

I see in The New York Times that rugged-individualist Western farmers are using drones to inspect crops and locate lost cattle, defying FAA regulations that forbid commercial use of the ubiquitous gadgets. “Precision agriculture,” as this kind of eye-in-the-sky farming has come to be called, seems like a pretty harmless thing — a good thing, […]

An airplane whose CG is significantly far behind the aft limit becomes neutrally stable or even mildly unstable. It can still be flown by a sufficiently alert pilot, but to a pilot who is unprepared for it, the experience is disorienting and can easily lead to overcontrol. Overcontrol in the nose-up direction, in turn, can […]