FLYING Magazine

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 […]

The phrase “armed and dangerous” is an idiom I apply to a pilot with hazardous attitudes such as anti-authority (“don’t tell me”), invulnerability (“it won’t happen to me”) and macho (“I can do it”). These individuals fly by their rules in unpredictable and potentially dangerous ways, disregard established flight-safety practices, seem unconcerned for their own […]

Learning to fly is still one of the greatest adventures, even in this modern high-tech digital era. And the first solo is for most pilots the most memorable flight. I was so euphoric when my instructor climbed out of the Aeronca 7AC and told me to take it once around the pattern that I forgot […]

I’d always wanted to learn to fly. After all, it was in my blood. My dad and mother had many dates in his Piper J-3 Cub. He would land in the hayfields of her father’s farm to pick her up. When the corn was short he landed in the cornfield between the rows. According to their story, […]

The chattering of alarms in the cockpit grabbed my attention. The Cessna CJ2 had just blasted through 12,000 feet, and now 14,000 feet, after takeoff from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, for our short flight to San Luis Obispo. I checked the annunciator panel and noticed the Cabin Alt red light was illuminated. […]

On a singular night in 1994, I learned that while there are many risks in flying, like in most other activities, succumbing to fear and panic is the worst possible way to deal with those risks. Flight training, while continuing to place the emphasis on risk avoidance, should highlight rationality in dealing with those risks, […]

Pop quiz. You’re in the pattern at a nontowered airport on a calm day, announcing your turn to base for Runway 35, which is right traffic. Just then, you hear two other pilots make their first calls on the common traffic advisory frequency—one of them announcing they’re 2 miles out on a straight-in downwind for […]