General

The month of August was not typical. Carol and I normally spend the summer enjoying our home in Connecticut. But on this particular occasion, we had filled part of the calendar with out of town excursions. One of the excursions was a week on Lake Powell with a handful of airline friends. The other event […]

Student pilots learn very early in their flying career how to avoid cloud and maintain visual reference to the ground. Even so, the classic case of a VFR pilot caught in IMC remains one of the most chilling scenarios in general aviation. The situation is made all the more critical when rising terrain is factored […]

I soloed Andrew Loewenstein last week. He’s a good-looking kid with black curly hair, the 16-year-old son of a corporate pilot friend. Drew had only three hours of “dual received” in his logbook but that doesn’t reflect years of flying little airplanes with his dad. So I sat in the grass while he took a […]

Like anyone else I am concerned about the high cost of avgas, so I decided to see how long I could fly on the least amount of gas. I managed to fly almost two hours using only a couple gallons of gas. Even better, the cost of the airplane was only $10 and the total […]

We have all been waiting for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to drop the bomb on private flying, and last fall it did with announcement of its new rules that impact all airplanes certified for takeoff weights above 12,500 pounds. In general, the TSA has taken the security procedures it inflicts on airlines and their […]

Nature is divergent. Darwin in the Galapagos encountered an outpouring of species, no two precisely alike. Aeronautical engineering seems to go the other way. All the species in a given niche eventually resemble one another. It practically takes a specialist to distinguish one business jet from the next. It was not always so. The early […]

When I started learning to fly it was because I was riding with a low-time pilot and was not comfortable with his skills. I wanted to be able to land if he fainted. After just a few lessons I was hooked. I continued my training through my private certificate and then my instrment rating. My […]

“Got along without you ‘fore I met you, gonna get along without you now.” So there, Garmin Perspective in the Cirrus SR22! Just as the lyrics suggest, my feelings are mixed. I’d love to be able to get along with the Perspective-equipped Cirrus, but frankly, that option is above my pay grade. I’ve struggled along […]

As I was hefting two humongous boxes of maintenance records into the 180, I found myself thinking about the draconian FAA rules for operating a DC-3, the outta-sight fuel prices, the cost of round engines, spare parts, insurance, a hangar and maintenance. And I said to myself, out loud, “Martha, do we really want to […]

When the FAA changed its weather reporting format to match the international metar standard several years ago many of us with more than a few years in the logbook scoffed. For one thing, what was a “metar” anyway? We had grown up, and grown old, with the sequence report that used to clatter out of […]