Peter Garrison

Here’s a heartening statistic: To judge from an unscientific search of NTSB accident records, fewer than one in eight fuel-exhaustion accidents during the period 2006 through 2010 were fatal. Notice that these are the accidents that come to the attention of the NTSB because they involve injury or property damage of a certain magnitude. We […]

The morning dawned misty and overcast; even low-lying areas to the east, which the marine stratus layer often did not reach, were reporting 100 feet and a quarter-mile. By noon, however, conditions at the airport had improved to 1,800 broken, 2,800 overcast and 10 miles visibility. A Cirrus SR22, whose destination lay to the east, […]

During the summe of 2010, my homebuilt, Melmoth 2, which had been flying for almost eight years, began to display a mystifying symptom. As I turned off the runway after landing, the main landing gear oleo on the outside of the turn would seem to collapse. The wing on that side would slump toward the […]

The photograph is haunting, if you know when it was taken. Most of the upper part of the frame is filled with a bright yellow wing, banked fairly steeply to the right. The flap is down a notch; the aileron too is deflected slightly downward. The lower part of the picture contains a patch of […]

I have before me a bound volume containing a year’s worth of Flying, a gift from an old friend and collaborator, pilot and photographer Baron Wolman, who picked it up at a swap meet for $4. The year, 1916, will surprise anyone who knows that our esteemed publication first appeared, under the name of Popular […]

Word came at 9:55 P.M. to the Chinle, Arizona, office of an air ambulance service that a patient needed transport from Alamosa, Colorado, 192 nm to the east-northeast. Forty minutes later, a King Air C90 with a pilot, a paramedic and a nurse aboard was airborne. It never arrived. The airplane struck a ridge 37 […]

(March 2012) It is understood among pilots that laminar flow is something good. But exactly what laminar flow looks and feels like eludes us, because air is invisible and so we never see the difference or the transition between laminar and turbulent. One common example of laminar flow in everyday experience is smoke rising from […]

(February 2012) Books about airplane design often mention wing incidence as if it were a parameter of some importance. It isn’t. In fact, “wing incidence” is a misnomer. I propose — and fully expect my proposal to have no effect — that the term be abandoned, and that we speak of “fuselage incidence” instead. The […]

(February 2012) Increasingly, flight is automatic. Navigation no longer requires an ounce of brains. Auto-pilots climb and descend, hold altitude, track waypoints and execute entire flight plans while idled crews ponder football scores. Autoland systems bring airplanes safely to earth, and even to the decks of aircraft carriers, in zero-zero weather. Only one phase of […]

On a Sunday afternoon in September 2009, a Piper Saratoga with four aboard was approaching Fort Lauderdale on an IFR flight plan from Gainesville. The Florida weather was fine, with scattered clouds and mild winds. The airplane was at 3,800 feet, on a heading of about 145 degrees, and was being handled by Miami Approach. […]