General

The FAA has conducted a study among pilots to determine how they use Flight Service Stations. The agency also hopes to determine what we like and don’t like about the FSS. Bottom line: the FAA is looking for reasons, or even cover, to radically change the FSS, or even eliminate it. The FAA’s reason for […]

There are certain things we have always with us; the Bible mentions the poor, but believers in the ultimate superiority of flying wings are another, and almost equally persistent, category. Like devout knights bent upon finding the chalice used by Jesus at the Last Supper, they keep their eyes unblinking on the prize. Their Grail […]

I don’t like the term “used” or “preowned” applied to airplanes. Those are standards of the automotive industry, and airplanes and cars have next to nothing in common. The best way to describe an airplane that isn’t brand new is “existing.” That’s the term typically applied to buildings. They are either new or existing. You […]

It was supposed to be such an easy flight. Oh, there was some weather that was supposed to move in that evening, but I’d called Flight Service five minutes before leaving for the airport, and they’d told me it was clear below 12,000 feet, with 10 miles visibility all along my route. And forecast to […]

Neither the acting nor the writing would win an Academy Award. “Well gosh, Wilbur, how come you get to be interviewed? I’m the one who flew it!” pouts a blond middle-school student with magic-marker facial hair. “Hey. Orville. Who’s older?” retorts his “brother,” a lanky, brown-haired 13-year-old. “You are.” “So who do you think is […]

Graduations are always a combination of happiness celebrating a job well done and sadness that a big part of the lives of everyone involved has come to an end. Over the four years our daughter Karen spent at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, my Baron was involved in every phase. Karen had […]

“Are you sure you don’t need anything else?” Karen Anderson asked. “No. No, I’m fine. Really.” “But your bottled water’s gotten warm,” she said. “Let me get you a cold one?” It’s hard to resist an offer like that. She took the warm water bottle and made her way to the galley at the back […]

It’s not apocryphal. A candidate for the instrument rating went up with an examiner for his flight test. The examiner, after carefully covering the screens on the airplane’s dual Garmin 430s, asked the pilot to perform an NDB approach. With some difficulty, the instrument candidate was finally able to explain to the examiner that without […]

I sat in our Miami pilots’ lounge, looking at the faces scattered around the room. It was a typical scene. Some pilots were reclined in lounge chairs while others were seated at a desk, plugged in to their laptops. Some pilots were engrossed in a newspaper. The TV at the front of the lounge flickered […]

My first introduction to Chicago politics occurred during a huge snowstorm in 1979. To my bewilderment, none of the streets in our neighborhood, save one, got plowed by the city. It turned out that the district in which I lived had not voted “appropriately” in the last election. The retribution for this bad behavior was […]