Peter Garrison

Let’s be frank. We don’t really need airfoils. Model planes with flat sheets of balsa wood for wings fly nicely; so do airplanes made of folded paper, and bumblebees and butterflies. A flat sheet makes a perfectly serviceable wing. That flat surfaces in the wind could produce the sideways force that we now call lift […]

On January 9, 2007, the pilot of a Cessna 207 prepared for a cargo flight from Kenai, Alaska, south of Anchorage, to Kokhanok, 127 nm miles to the southwest. It was around 10 in the morning-but the winter sun was still below the horizon — when he started the engine, which had been warmed during […]

It was the middle of a short December day when a call came to a helicopter emergency medical service (HEMS) firm in Soldotna, Alaska, requesting transport for a patient to Anchorage from a clinic in Cordova. Soldotna is south and west of Anchorage; Cordova is 127 nm east. The helicopter would first have to position […]

“The pilot’s failure to maintain airspeed while maneuvering for approach to land. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s operation of the airplane above the design gross weight.” Such was the verdict of the National Transportation Safety Board as to the probable cause of the fatal crash of a Cessna 172 at St. Petersburg-Clearwater airport […]

Our Flying Mail column is an equal-opportunity zone. Truth and falsehood mingle freely there. In the April issue a reader, Hal Stiles of North Miami, Florida, wrote to assert that “Pusher props are superior.” He pointed out that the Cessna Skymaster, the push-pull twin with one tractor and one pusher engine, performs better on the […]

In June 2006 a Beech B36TC Bonanza, fresh out of annual inspection, lost power while cruising at 5,000 feet on the way from Kalamazoo to Ypsilanti, Michigan. Although conditions were day VMC, the 950-hour pilot had filed an IFR flight plan. He advised the controller of the situation and asked for a vector to the […]

I didn’t know Walter Kielbowicz. I know a few things about him, for which I have the internet to thank. He was born in 1917 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was an MP during World War II. He was married for 60 years and fathered two daughters. He worked as a lab technician in Holyoke, Massachusetts, […]

In 2007, two airplanes crashed a month apart, in somewhat similar circumstances. Both were light sport aircraft of European manufacture; both had two aboard; both stalled and spun from low altitude. In its findings of probable cause in the two accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board raised issues that should be of concern to light […]

At a recent dinner gathering, a few days after the wonderfully well-omened US Airways ditching in the Hudson, when several guests had been grilling me about bird strikes and ditching procedures, someone commented that her worst nightmare was being in an airplane when the pilot had a heart attack. “How often,” another guest asked me, […]

A few months ago, the talk of the internet was a YouTube video of a stunt plane that lost a wing in flight and nevertheless managed to land safely. Many people in many countries sent me this video; the subject lines of the first few e-mails, which came from pilots, tended to marvel at the […]