Learning Experiences

After a few months of relatively inactive flying, I discovered my flight review had expired. Although my flight instructor and I flew often over the last two years, they never signed off a BFR for me, and it had been more than 24 months since my last one. Scheduling my favorite club airplane and instructor […]

For 18 years, I flew a tricycle-gear Aero Designs Pulsar XP experimental out of a non-towered, high-altitude airport in Southern California, making at least 2500 takeoffs/landings at the airport. Last September, I flew a breakfast flight to an airport about 30 nm away, landed with buddies and all was well. Landing out of the return […]

A friend of mine and I departed our home airport in my 1976 Piper Arrow II. I recently had a new autopilot installed in the airplane and, while initial test flights showed everything worked as expected, we wanted to go put the new equipment through some exercises. We were eager to see how it worked, which […]

I was a “young” pilot, with barely 200 hours, practicing solo closed patterns in our Mooney M20J. After a solid landing on the first, I powered off the runway for the second. Then it happened. At 300 feet, climbing at VX, my engine faltered with no warning; I had lost all power at the worst time! […]

I was tired of renting from the local FBO and needed a larger airplane, anyway, for the growing family, so I looked at a few flying clubs. One situation caught my eye, in which a long-time owner wasn’t flying his big Cessna much and wanted to form a club around it. I was game, and met […]

It already had been a long day, flogging my Piper Arrow across what felt like half the U.S. I was aiming for a sizable regional airport to spend some vacation time with an old friend, which was turning into a two-leg, seven-hour slog into headwinds. The weather mostly had been clear, but an undercast crept […]

The day’s mission was to get me and my A36 Bonanza from Virginia to Wichita, Kansas, with a stop in Columbus, Ohio, to pick up some fuel and a pilot-rated passenger going to the same multi-day meeting I was attending. The first leg was solo and uneventful, and soon my passenger and I were winging […]

Years ago, when I was working on my flight instructor certificate, I was doing a lot of flying. Necessarily, much of it was from the right seat, but I also flew a lot on the left side, for personal and business travel. I had become comfortable in either seat of the airplanes I was flying. […]

Owning an airplane provides endless possibilities even as it presents new challenges. While anyone who’s owned and flown the same airplane for a few years likely will become comfortable with it, that’s not always the case with passengers, even if they’re experienced pilots. The first time I encountered a nervous passenger—”nervous” in this instance involved […]

Many years ago, as a new private pilot, I found myself dealing with a false sense of security and passenger distractions. It was a nice afternoon in southern California, and a couple of co-workers and I just finished work. They had never been in a small plane before, so we headed to Montgomery Field in […]