Peter Garrison

We look through the glass and what do we see?

On a Sunday morning in April 2004, an air-ambulance helicopter approaching to land in VFR conditions found a blanket of fog forming over the Ukiah Municipal Airport (KUKI) in California. The automatic surface-observation system reported a 100-foot overcast and visibility between 1 and 1¾ miles. The ATP-rated pilot obtained a clearance for the localizer approach […]

Finding an alternative term for this imprecise aerodynamic one.

Whatever may be said about the FAA, it produces some useful publications. One of them is Advisory Circular 90-109A, Transition to Unfamiliar Aircraft. Not to be confused with its sister publication, AC 90-89, Amateur-Built Aircraft and Ultralight Flight Testing Handbook, AC 90-109A is directed at pilots beginning to fly an airplane of a type with […]

Back in the day, when FAA employees outnumbered amateur airplane builders, a government inspector would do a “pre-closure” inspection on every part of your homebuilt, then return for a pre-first-flight inspection and again every year thereafter. The quality of these inspectors varied. Some were skilled A&Ps who almost always found a discrepancy that you had […]

I recently selected 32 accident analyses, from the nearly 500 that I have written since I took over Flying’s Aftermath column in 1980, and assembled them into a book called Why? Thinking About Plane Crashes. It’s available from Amazon as a paperback or an e-book. I hope someone will buy it. I would pledge that […]

For the past three years in the aviation press, occasional spy photos have appeared, showing an unusual blimplike airplane parked at the former George Air Force Base, now Southern California Logistics Airport, near Victorville, California. This oddity has now made its formal debut. Its name is Celera 500L, and it is a product of Otto […]

In December 2019, a Canadian-registry Piper Aerostar 602P with three aboard left Cabo San Lucas in Baja California, Mexico, to return home to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The group stopped overnight at Chino, California, east of Los Angeles—perhaps to visit the aviation museum there—and continued the next day to Nanaimo with a […]

My friend Longbridge has been working for years—these things always take far longer than you think they will—on a Lancair 320 with a lot of airframe mods, the most conspicuous of which are a double-slotted Fowler flap, enlarged empennage surfaces, and leading-edge cuffs on the outer panels of the wings. And then there are the […]

Several colleagues knew of a pilot’s limitations before a fatal 767 accident.