General

I intended for this month’s column to be a summary of my experience at the world’s most highly acclaimed airshow, but circumstances dictated another perspective. Much to my disappointment, the circumstances weren’t what I anticipated. After all my Paris layovers, I would finally be in town for the Paris Air Show. Instead of wearing my […]

It seems, from recent media reports, that the general public has a myopic view of general aviation. Voices have been raised castigating executives for flying in business jets and decrying the expenditure of funds that go to rural and “underused” general aviation airports. There’s an unfortunate disconnect between who and what we are and the […]

The Greeks would have had a name for it, I imagine. Not quite a full tragedy, because there were moments of greatness. But it’s a complex memory that I still can’t easily categorize. So when my friend Pat called and asked what should have been a couple of simple questions, I had no easy or […]

The flying public will never witness a white-haired captain shuffling a walker through the terminal, but the improbable image seems closer to reality now that airline pilots can fly to the age of 65. My colleagues who fought the new legislation are probably not laughing, however. Statistics indicate that medical issues, mostly cardiac, increase as […]

Harvard-educated in English, Peter Garrison is a self-taught aerodynamicist whose writing concentrates on what makes airplanes work and how they can be improved, and on the factors, both mechanical and human, that sometimes cause them to crash. When no production airplane satisfied Peter’s desire for range and efficiency, he built his own and called it […]

For no apparent reason, Martha fell in love with airplanes at age nine and she learned to fly an Ercoupe in the early 1960s while attending college in her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. Armed with a degree in English Literature, she became a flight instructor and operated a flying school at Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport for […]

Les Abend is currently a 777 captain, has logged almost 18,000 hours and has been with his favorite airline for 23 years. He began writing his Jumpseat column for Flying in January 2003. Les soloed before he was able to legally drive and subsequently earned his private pilot license at age 17. He was a […]

The weather for the first two-thirds of the flight from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, to Lebanon, New Hampshire, was good, right up to the part where a stalled cold front kicked up thunderstorms and at the same time produced low ceilings, fog and reduced visibility over most of the Northeast. Lebanon is in a nonradar […]

A big chunk of my first 6,000 hours was spent instructing … possibly 5,000 hours too many. Yeah, it takes patience, but it’s fun and spiced with occasional adrenaline moments, like when somebody is trying to kill you. It’s also a little like logging one hour 6,000 times. When I found myself nodding off on […]

Being an aunt is not the same thing as being a parent. Aside from some obvious differences, including the level of exhaustion involved, the two roles create very different instincts and perspectives. When my sister Gail’s kids were toddlers, she was constantly saying things like: “Watch that corner. Tyler might hit his head on it.” […]