Peter Garrison

My morning routine is to get up at 6 o’clock or so, make coffee — an elaborate ceremony that involves measuring out and grinding the beans, pre-wetting the grounds, dribbling water over them at a certain temperature, and all that stuff; I think I prefer the ritual to the coffee — and sit on the […]

A ready asked me the purpose of the odd-looking fin projecting downward from the nose of the Defiant on the cover of our August 2011 “Rutan Retrospective” issue. It’s the rudder. Rutan called it a “rhino rudder,” because in versions he tried on the VariEze and Long-EZ it was on top. But what was the […]

You’re flying a twin-engine jet transport. The engines are at full power. The wings are rocking, but the heading is steady. The pitch attitude is 15 degrees nose up, but the VSI says that you are descending at 10,000 fpm. The flight director needles command a nose-up pitch. What should you do? It’s hard, isn’t […]

To the cliché that there are pilots who have landed gear up and those who will, one might add a third category: those who have, and will again. I made my first and, so far, only gear-up landing in a Fournier RF-4 motor glider, N7723, on Jan. 23, 1969, at Yucca Valley, California. The RF-4 […]

About 120 nautical miles separate Winchester and Lynchburg, Virginia. But even a nearby destination may prove strangely difficult to reach. The pilot-owner of a 1964 Cessna 210D, a 50-year-old physician with about 300 hours, left Winchester for Lynchburg, alone, a few minutes before 8 o’clock on an April evening. He had made the same trip, […]

In February 2010, a CESSNA T337G Skymaster made a low pass over the runway at Farmingdale, New Jersey. As it pulled up, a six-foot piece of the right wing broke away; the ensuing crash, before the eyes of friends and relatives for whose benefit the pass was being made, killed all five aboard. In August […]

It ought not to be true, but it is: In every pilot’s life there comes a moment when he wishes he had a little more fuel. Perhaps the headwind was stronger than forecast; the gauges have dropped below a quarter sooner than you hoped they would; the descent and climb for an en route stop […]

Considering how rare single-seat twins are outside the military, it’s remarkable how little information about N72TZ can be found on the Internet. The NTSB’s report on the fatal outcome of its first flight provides scant detail about the airplane itself. It seems, from bits and pieces mined here and there, to have been one of […]

At a late and insomniac hour, when you can’t find a Law and Order rerun that you haven’t already seen and resuming your reading of the family’s Encyclopaedia Britannica at GUNN to HYDROX seems too arduous to contemplate, it is well to resort to YouTube, that portable and compendious ocean of funny cats, sadistic pratfalls, […]

You will never understand lift. Forget it. You haven’t got a chance. So I muttered to myself as I closed a fascinating book called The Enigma of the Aerofoil. The author, David Bloor, is an emeritus professor of the University of Edinburgh whose field is the sociology of science: how cultural and personal factors shape […]