I.L.A.F.F.T

It was my first flying job—the one you dreamed about having all your life. The one for which you strove, saved and worked so hard, and it was finally real. I had to leave my native New Zealand and move to the Australian Outback to get it, but that just made it all the more […]

A lot has been written over the past few years about pilots relying on the automation to fly the airplane to the detriment of actual hands-on-the-stick piloting skills. I have long been baffled by pilots’ reliance on the autopilot. But perhaps this attitude comes from my Air Force training early on and particularly from a […]

I’ve been flying for 30 years and never experienced a hiccup from an airplane engine while airborne. That changed a few minutes into a recent flight. This story can’t rival a sudden engine stoppage and forced landing—it’s a story of an engine that seemed on its way to quitting—but I hope it provides some useful […]

Love Flying’s “I Learned About Flying From That” series? Tune in for the rest of the story—with exclusive interviews with pilots who have shared their emergencies, crises, and mistakes over 950-plus installments of the iconic I.L.A.F.F.T. series. Host Rob Reider relates a tale from our archives—as told by the author—then catches up with that pilot […]

In an airplane, surely cheap thrills are better than costly thrills—but, frankly, a safer atmosphere in the cockpit may be boring thrills. Boredom in an airplane is good. I begin to sound cynical here when, in truth, I feel that our best experiences in airplanes can fall somewhere between serenity and a luminous exaltation. Here […]

A solar eclipse seemed like the perfect excuse for a cross-country flight to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from San Diego with friends in our recently acquired Cirrus SR22T. My close friend Howard was just as excited for the trip as I was. Our less adventurous wives, not so much. My wife protested, “I don’t get it, […]

It was August 15, 2015, the day my two daughters invited me out for breakfast for my 90th birthday. They took me to the EAA gathering held the third Saturday of every month at Marv Skie-Lincoln County Airport in Tea, South Dakota. As we ate breakfast with the local pilots in the main hangar on this […]

It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and nobody was flying. My open-cockpit biplane, a Great Lakes 2T-1A-1, was just the answer for a relaxing start to the day. It’s a great airplane for sightseeing. It flies low and slow, and turns on a dime. I departed Montgomery Airport (KMYF) in San Diego and put down […]

It was a chilly March day in New Jersey, but the temperatures were finally rising above freezing on a regular basis. Signs of snow had all but vanished, and we CFIs at the flight school were looking forward to the start of spring and better flying weather. On my schedule was a private pilot with […]

I’ve been diagnosed with a very unhealthy amount of cancer and am starting to take stock of my life. Looking back at a 35-year love affair with flying small airplanes, I realize just how important flying was to me personally. I just reviewed my logbook for the first time in many years and found one […]