General

The way I see it, Angelina Jolie and I have a lot in common. We’re both women pilots who own our own airplanes. We’ve both flown with Air Serv International in Africa. We’ve both spent time with Darfur refugees. And, as of one recent Friday evening, I can say with all truthfulness that we’ve both […]

By now I should know to expect anything and everything to fail while training in a flight simulator, but experienced instructors like FlightSafety’s Fred Pfeiffer can concoct scenarios that I never thought of before. The purpose is to make you think about the airplane and its systems, but also to reinforce that complacency is the […]

Like all born-again aviators, I consider low flying (“flat-hatting,” “dusting off,” “buzzing”) illegal, immoral, immature and possibly fattening, but, gee whiz, it’s still kind of sad that creative contour flying has gone the way of venturi tubes and ashtrays in the instrument panel. Maybe the daredevils who didn’t prang themselves all went west. Or maybe […]

A few years ago my friend Javier Arango and I got to talking about certain oft-repeated statements about the airplanes of World War I. Javier has a collection of very accurate reproductions of World War I airplanes (as well as a genuine Camel and Bleriot 11) and happens to be a scholarly fellow with a […]

It’s an odd name, “Silent Birdpersons” or “Flying Burritos” or “Kwiet Kestrels.” Not just right, but close. It’s possible you’ve heard of, maybe even belong to, this quasi-venerable and intergalactic order of aviators — male aviators. If not, it’s something like the Flying Knights of Columbus or the Order of Masonic Boom(ers). Except that the […]

With everybody enamored of machines that aviate without the interference of humans, “Unmanned Air Vehicles” are currently a hot topic. Like that Airbus with a cabin full of passengers bound for Minneapolis that flew itself so well it just kept going … 150 miles beyond Minneapolis. See, I just can’t buy that story about two […]

When I was 24, I decided to try to get in shape by jogging. There was a 7K road race coming up in Louisville, Kentucky, where I was living at the time, so my friend Kirk and I decided we’d set ourselves the goal of getting in shape for the run. Kirk was a pharmaceutical […]

Aerodynamicists seldom earn long obits in the New York Times, but Richard Whitcomb, who died last Oct. 13 at 88, did. He left a conspicuous imprint on the design of modern airplanes. He was responsible for the winglet, the supercritical airfoil — which he designed not on a computer, as would be done today, but […]

Hooper Bay, Alaska, might not be quite the end of the earth but, as the saying goes, you can probably see it from there. It’s a tiny town halfway up the western Alaskan coast, north of the Aleutian Islands, and the 1,200 people who live there actually can see Russia from their back doors. In […]

The wag who said he was “sure there was money in aviation because he put it there” might have been Ebby Lunken, who saw a sizable chunk of cash disappear into his beloved Midwest Airways. It was a grand idea and would have succeeded if the income from ticket sales had even approached the outgo […]