Peter Garrison

In April, Tampa, Florida, postman Doug Hughes landed his gyrocopter in the backyard of the U.S. Capitol. He was trying to deliver 535 letters to members of Congress explaining his opinions on campaign financing, but I suspect they ended up in an evidence room instead. They wouldn’t have had much effect on the thinking of […]

The King Air had been airborne for just 30 minutes, en route from Pine Bluff to Bentonville in Arkansas, when it began its descent from 16,500 feet. The weather was clear, and the 3,400-hour private pilot, 72, was on VFR flight following with Razorback Approach at Fort Smith. Nine minutes after leaving 16.5, he told […]

In my March Aftermath column on the 2012 crash of a Pilatus PC-12 in Florida, I faulted the National Transportation Safety Board for mixing up indicated and true airspeeds. Actually, it was I who misread the report. I am indebted to reader Timothy Burtch, an accident investigator with the NTSB, for pointing out that the […]

It was a little after noon on a cloudy December day when a B36TC Bonanza with five aboard climbed out of Baker City, in northeastern Oregon, bound for Butte, Montana, 234 nm away. A few minutes after takeoff the pilot called Salt Lake Center to activate his IFR flight plan. He was cleared direct to […]

A Mooney M20J with two aboard, flown by a 300-hour private pilot, began its takeoff roll on Runway 19 at Kansas City Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport (MKC) at intersection Kilo, with 5,313 feet of runway remaining. The pilot retracted the landing gear immediately after liftoff and began a climb, whereupon the engine lost power. […]

The day began benignly enough. I flew to Las Vegas in midmorning to pick up a couple of friends and bring them back to Los Angeles. The flight up was routine, cruising at 7,500 feet, 15-knot headwind, but smooth and clear with unlimited visibility. We put in 20 gallons at North Las Vegas, where the […]

The fault may have been in their stars — it would be easy to check with the help of a good astrologer — but amateur-built and otherwise non-type-certificated aircraft hit an especially rough patch in April 2014. The run of bad luck actually began a couple of weeks earlier, on Feb. 16, when the 77-year-old […]

I am writing this on Dec. 31, 2014. On this day some people prepare resolutions. I catalog regrets. At this time a year ago I was racking my brain over an apparent rise in oil temperature in my homebuilt, which has an updraft-cooled Continental TSIO-360 engine. This is an airplane I designed and built and […]

Just after noon on a June day in 2012, a Pilatus PC-12 took off from Fort Pierce, in the middle of Florida’s Atlantic coast, bound for Junction City, Kansas. The pilot, his wife and their four young children were aboard, returning from a vacation in the Bahamas. Less than a minute later, the pilot engaged […]

During 18 months in 2003 and 2004, SpaceShipOne, Scaled Composites’ original air-launched spaceplane, made 14 free flights of which six were powered, the rest glides. Although SS1 was a novel design with an untried type of motor and was venturing into inhospitable territory last visited by the X-15 almost 50 years earlier, the privately funded […]