Flying Staff

Self-service avgas at my home airport is now $5.65 a gallon. And it promises to go higher with the next delivery from the fuel supplier. Suddenly, the cost of fuel is a much larger portion of my operating costs. I’ve been running lean of peak so the Lycoming IO-360 in my Cessna Cardinal runs at […]

“This turn’s going to be tricky,” Luke says as he surveys the 90-degree angle onto Runway 18/36 at Oshkosh. I glance around the Mustang speedster convertible we’ve borrowed from Roush Racing for this particular job. There is a roll bar, but it’s also still a convertible. “Just don’t roll it,” I say. Luke shoots me […]

Four of us were invited to a friend’s house in Northern California, a 10-hour drive from Los Angeles. “Could we all go up in your plane?” Carl asked. Two hours and 15 minutes sounded a lot better. I had to say no. What was the problem? My homebuilt, Melmoth 2, is a four-seater. It was […]

Oshkosh is the place to see and hear about new airplanes, many of which propose to revolutionize a category, or even create a new category of aircraft. The fact that virtually none succeed doesn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm of pilots, developers or investors. I have often said, and firmly believe, that to stay alive […]

Location, as any real estate agent will tell you, is everything. For years, I’d watched the warbird formations fly over the field at Oshkosh without any great sense of awe. That’s not to say it wasn’t cool to see diamond after diamond of T-6, T-28 or T-34 trainers fly overhead. But the sight never made […]

Imagine an airplane — or house or car or spouse, for that matter — that you have loved for decades but over those years you have wished for some changes and improvements in key areas. The Hawker line of business jets has been admired by legions of pilots and passengers for more than 40 years, […]

By now you have no doubt read that the big cabin, ultra-long-range Falcon 7X uses fly-by-wire technology to connect the human pilot to the flight controls, a first for business jets. Falcon insists on calling this a digital flight control system (DFCS) because all of the computers are digital, not analog, but to a pilot […]

The Beech Super King Air 350 has been a special airplane since its inception with its enormous useful load, big cabin and certification in the tougher commuter category. But the new ER (extended range) version is truly designed to fly a unique mission profile. Bottom line, the 350ER has a maximum takeoff weight of 16,500 […]

The first thing that hits me is the silence. As Jacques Brun and his D140 Mousquetaire II disappear into the distance, it is suddenly very, very quiet. I look around. Then the full craziness and impact of my predicament hit me. And I start to feel very, very small. Five minutes ago, I was happily […]