General

My Jeppesen Private Pilot Manual tells student pilots that radio communication is very serious stuff. “When speaking on the radio,” the good book says, “it is important to speak in a professional manner. Radio transmissions should be as brief as possible to help avoid frequency congestion. Incorrect radio procedures can compromise your safety and the […]

Are the $100 hamburgers getting old? Have you visited every airport restaurant within 100 miles so many times that the staff greets you by name and has your favorite meal ready? Did you already give all your friends rides, so that you are now reduced to approaching people on the street, like the press gangs […]

The late September rain is pounding on the fuselage above me and coursing across the narrow, rectangular windscreen that sits less than a foot in front of my face. The frigid Alaskan ocean lies only 400 feet beneath us, but if we went any higher, we’d be in the clouds-clouds that are obscuring a line […]

I don’t know his name, and I didn’t quite catch his N-number. But somewhere in the San Francisco area, there’s a pilot who owes me an apology. I was flying my Cheetah down to the Oakland International Airport on July 4th to pick up a friend who was flying in for a visit. It was […]

||| |—|—| | | | The morning was still clear and cool when I pushed the Cheetah’s throttle forward and lifted off from Runway one-four at Santa Rosa. At first it was a takeoff like any other I’d had with the plane, and I let out a sigh of relief at finally being off on […]

Some time ago I wrote about the relationship between thrust and horsepower, and the question of why one is used to describe the output of pure reaction engines and the other that of engines driving propellers. I argued that the reason was historical. The great majority of engines-steam, gasoline or what have you-have been designed […]

It wasn’t a big deal. Shortly before Judith and I were slated to leave for a trip (possible only with our own airplane) to a reunion of college friends in Wyoming, a stop to help with haying at the Flying A Ranch in South Dakota and a week at AirVenture in Oshkosh, I fell off […]

“Uh … Cherokee Five Two Five Lima Charlie, confirm level at 5,000?” You glance at your altimeter. It reads 4,600 feet. The pointer on the vertical speed indicator is steady on 500 feet per minute down. The sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach is not caused by the rapid movement of back pressure […]

Here I sit in the right seat of a fine old 172, inside the marker on an ILS approach, my first ever instrument student refusing to correct for the wind. I watch the localizer needle drift off and feel myself twisting my entire upper body to force it back to center. Should I tell him […]

In the 99-year history of powered flight it would be hard to pick the worst year, but these past 12 months are near the top of every pilot’s list. Frustrated is the word that sums up the way most of us feel. Though much of aviation has returned to near normal, a cloud of suspicion […]