General

Jim, my copilot, peered at the computer screen as I tapped the appropriate codes onto the keyboard. We both glanced at the green display that appeared. Yup … our airplane was late as usual-almost 40 minutes. We were departing La Guardia, flying to Miami, and then on to Port of Spain in Trinidad. Little did […]

Probably the most feared situation in aviation, besides perhaps an inflight fire, is a midair collision. One moment a pilot is enjoying the flight. He may be checking his chart or tuning a radio. Or maybe he is talking with a passenger or taking a drink of water. Suddenly there is a loud crash. The […]

An old friend was joshing the other day about how I fly my single-engine airplane like it is an airliner. Checklists, procedures, callouts, I do them all. My friend is an airline pilot and I took his remarks as a compliment. I have always thought that if we emulate professional aircrews (to the extent possible) […]

My copilot walked over to the counter top in JFK Operations where I had scattered various segments of the flight plan paperwork. His pace was quick. He introduced himself and apologized for his slight tardiness. He had commuted in from South Carolina to La Guardia and had taken a taxi ride through rush hour traffic […]

I Shivered a little that September morning at Nashua Airport, on a ladder with my finger in the left tank of the Cessna 180 taildragger. Good, the 100LL was puddling over the flaps. Topping these tanks was kind of funky because the airplane had rubber bladders and stiffly hinged flappers under the caps … new […]

We always thought my dad wanted his ashes spread over Cherry Hill, the family farm and B&B in the Catskill Mountains where he grew up. But my mother vetoed our plans to airdrop his ashes from my Cardinal and said he had expressed a desire to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. And so he […]

It was a nice VFR Friday afternoon in early summer when I was returning home to Westchester County Airport just north of New York City. In other words, it was just about as bad as air traffic – or ground traffic, for that matter – gets in the Northeast. Summer and a Friday add up […]

The week was not going well. My landlord had accidentally cut down my flowering plum tree. Huge roadblocks had sprung up in three separate work projects. I’d had to shell out $550 to get my car fixed. And I’d been inundated by a swarm of termites coming through my bathroom walls. So it was with […]

With the advent of the new glass cockpits, a lot of thought went into the kind of training that would be necessary to adequately prepare a pilot to safely utilize these more sophisticated systems. The FAA worked with the general aviation industry to put together a set of standards for glass cockpit training. The original […]

I was flying a Piper Cherokee 180, one I had rented and flown many times before. Outbound, I had flown alone from Seattle to an airstrip at Sekiu, Washington. The airstrip serves a tiny fishing village along the north coast of the Olympic Peninsula 150 miles west of Seattle. Although I had landed in daylight, […]