Editor’s Log

February 2025 is the last issue of this magazine that will be printed on paper and mailed to subscribers.

It won’t be long before grandkids will be hopping into our laps, begging us to tell them again about how we used to fly piston-powered airplanes by hand.

The late Jimmy Buffett long ago came up with the perfect song title for summers in Florida: “Trying To Reason With Hurricane Season.”

By the time you read this, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere will be well along on our journey from summer to winter. Autumn’s colors and apple cider will have given way to crisper evenings punctuated with the sound of leaf blowers. We’ll all have to dig our sweaters and warm coats out of […]

If you’re like me, you subscribe to several aviation-related information sources, of which there are many genres. Some of the ones I pay attention to include brief quizzes plus scenarios designed for us to self-assess how risky a proposed operation might be. An example might be asking if you would take off in a VFR-only […]

It’s been a minute or two, but one of the show planes at EAA’s AirVenture fly-in one year was an immaculate Fairchild radial-engine single. I was admiring it one day and read the description, noting the pilot and airplane were based at the Smoketown Airport (S37) in Smoketown, Pennsylvania, near Lancaster. To many, that airport […]

John Zimmerman, president of Sporty’s, recently penned an essay in Air Facts, where he’s also editor-in-chief. The essay’s title— “Ignore the YouTube crash detectives—it’s usually pilot error”— tells you pretty much everything you need to know about it. John’s specific lament is that, “When a high performance airplane crashes in IMC, the self-proclaimed experts on […]

General aviation is always under a pall of bad news when it comes to growth. If it’s not stupid pilot tricks or a celebrity getting the wrong kind of attention, we can look no further than contemporary sales figures for piston airplanes and compare them with the late 1970s. Another scorekeeping statistic is student starts, […]

As I relate in greater detail in the article beginning on page 7, I flew my Beech Debonair and some friends up to Houlton, Maine, and back in early April to view what the FAA termed the “Great North American Eclipse.” On the four-day roundtrip, the airplane racked up more than 20 tach hours and […]

Even after all the trials and tribulations Boeing has gone through with its 737 MAX fleet, I still have a warm spot in my heart for many of its products. I’ve never been enamored of—or uneasy aboard—the 737 series, but the 727 and the 757 are at the top of my list for airliners I […]