Careers

It was a simple itinerary: Tampa, Florida, to Washington, D.C.’s Reagan Airport on a Saturday afternoon, join some medical colleagues for dinner, participate in a panel at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology on Sunday morning and catch the 11:40 flight back to Tampa. US Airways kept pushing the departure time to […]

It’s almost 8 a.m., but darkness still clings to the edges of the frozen prairie. The sun has risen somewhere above the impassive overcast, but here the only herald of morning’s coming is black sky fading to battleship gray. The dim light reveals a bleak landscape, flat and nearly treeless. The wind whips and howls […]

As an airline pilot, I generally try to stay out of the newspapers. Finding oneself on the front page of The New York Times usually means you’ve bent some metal, partied too hard on an overnight or finally lost patience with the TSA and sucker punched one of its goons while cellphone cameras rolled. And […]

| It’s an annual rite of passage for millions of high school seniors: anxiously checking their mailboxes for thick envelopes and weighing their options about where to go to college. For that special breed of student who couldn’t imagine anything less than a career in aviation, the choices become somewhat clearer. If your goal is […]

The FAA has further clarified what the new Restricted Airline Transport Pilot (R-ATP) certificate might mean for recent college graduates. The new rules require airline first officers to hold an ATP and to have logged 1,500 hours of flight time, or an R-ATP license and 1,000 hours if they’ve graduated from an approved four-year aviation […]

The lobby of the Hilton Hotel across from the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, is packed with conventioneers. They are making a joyous noise. I am looking for Phil Smith among the throng; we will be joined at the hip for the better part of a month as we progress through “Indoc” at […]

It’s not something I usually admit in polite company, but I think I’m fairly prone to addiction. I’ve never been a raging alcoholic or desperate junkie, mind you, but when I take an interest in something, I tend to go all in. Shortly after I started motorcycling, I rode my old BMW on a 15,000-mile […]

It was a spectacularly clear spring day in Lakeland, Florida. My wife, Cathy, and I were sauntering from exhibit to exhibit with four friends at Sun ’n Fun. The airshow had just begun. A fleet of Pitts Specials screamed by. We were just talking to Darryl Taylor of Van Bortel Aircraft in Texas about the […]

A British Airways poll conducted last month shows that at least British kids still aspire to fly. The independent research involved 650 U.K. youngsters from ages six to 12. Most boys chose careers as football (soccer) players, followed by pilots and then “superheroes.” (Nice to know pilots came out ahead of caped crusaders.) Girls favored […]

Should you pack a tie for Oshkosh? Redbird Flight Simulations has announced it will host pilot interviews for SkyWest Airlines, as well as conduct evaluations of candidates’ IFR skills in a King Air 350i simulator. The process will all take place at the Redbird tent (No. 208) on the EAA AirVenture grounds. Redbird and SkyWest […]