Peter Garrison

According to an eyewitness whose attention was caught by the loud gunning of its engine as it approached the airport, the little two-seater’s wings both vibrated visibly before the left wing folded back against the fuselage. The airplane pitched downward and began to spin; the right wing then bent upward, and it too folded back […]

IT HAPPENED LAST MAY, DURING an air race in South Africa. An airplane was descending toward a turn point in a valley when the pilot of a following airplane saw what appeared to be paper scattering behind it. An instant later, a shattered wing separated from the fuselage, falling to earth a hundred yards from […]

Contempt and awe seldom wed, but height may make a match between them. One of the intermittent rewards of flying is the thought-provoking perspective it provides: We look down upon great cities reduced to anonymous gray smudges, or the lights of a solitary car speeding alone at midnight across a canvas of black velvet. The […]

Early on June 23 of last year, two men and three teenage boys left Spirit of St. Louis Airport in a Cherokee Lance for some trout fishing at Gaston’s White River Resort, which is located in the Ozarks of northern Arkansas. The 170 nm flight took an hour and a quarter. Three days later, on […]

JUNE 2010 — Experience is the best teacher. Too bad she’s so mean. I knew that my battery was slowly dying, but I was trying to put off buying a new one — two, actually, since my homebuilt, which has a 28-volt electrical system, uses a pair of Yuasa motorcycle batteries in series. After all, […]

A look at the NTSB’s report on the February 2009 crash in Buffalo, New York.

May 2010 ONE OF THE MORE persistent hoaxes drifting about on the Internet concerns an airplane called the Kalinin K-7. Built in the early 1930s, the K-7 was Russian, and big. Really big. Russian designers those days displayed a positive passion for sheer size; Igor Sikorsky’s Ilya Muromets, for example, which flew just 10 years […]

Many years ago the author Richard Bach, then writing for Flying, proposed that the solution for a pilot who had flown into a box canyon and could not turn between its walls was to pull up into a vertical climb, perform a stall turn and recover going in the other direction. Pilots who had never […]

Certain universal questions pop up over and over, like “Why is there something, when there could be nothing?” or “Can a jet fly faster than its own exhaust velocity?” Let’s look at the second one; I’ll get back to the first in a future column. Reciprocating engines inhale about 15 pounds of air for every […]

A few years ago my friend Javier Arango and I got to talking about certain oft-repeated statements about the airplanes of World War I. Javier has a collection of very accurate reproductions of World War I airplanes (as well as a genuine Camel and Bleriot 11) and happens to be a scholarly fellow with a […]