Remarks

One of the beautiful things about Oshkosh is the self-deception: Stand in the middle of the crowded grounds, teaming with people and aircraft, and you can enjoy the momentary illusion that aviation is actually a popular, well-attended activity.

Theres only one newsprint periodical I still read on real newsprint: The Funny Times. Its mostly a mix of satiric essays and left-leaning political cartoons, but my favorite section is the News of the Weird page. These are real-world news stories collected under sub-headings like Government Inaction and Couldnt Possibly Be True.

One of the beautiful things about Oshkosh is the self-deception: Stand in the middle of the crowded grounds, teaming with people and aircraft, and you can enjoy the momentary illusion that aviation is actually a popular, well-attended activity.

Years ago I was briefly involved in motorcycle road racing. T-shirts with the slogan, Crashing Sucks and a suitable graphic were quite popular. Even then, I thought how appropriate that slogan also was for aviation. Now we find ourselves with back-to-back airliner crashes while landing in visual conditions and Im reminded of just how appropriate that slogan is to aviation. Crashing sucks for all the obvious reasons, but we must also remember that aviation is a…

At my day job flying airliners, I encounter many pilots for whom flying has sadly become a tedious demand, necessary to put bread on the table, and they’d no sooner take the controls of an airplane on a day off than they’d willingly pay more taxes. Many more might occasionally daydream about GA, but families, […]

I just attended the insurance-mandated recurrent training for my C340A that I haven’t flown in years. I made my share of mistakes, most of which the scenarios are designed to uncover. A few of ‘em really made me think about things. And that’s really what IFR flight is all about. Anybody with even modest hand-eye […]

Trust me. I’m painfully aware it’s July already. And that’s really part of the point. I’ve got to fly more often, something I vowed to do at the top of the year. More years ago than I’ll admit in print, I started a project to renovate the instrument panel in my Cessna 340. You see, […]

Drawings like this have been “out there” for years, although I’d not seen one until a contributor recently forwarded one to me. This resonates mostly because the humor stems from a truth that is a disconcertingly sober one. Let’s explore these four forces.

The battle has raged a long time between useful, inexpensive, portable, non-certified devices and panel-mount certified instrumentation. In practice, weve long used non-certified portables for navigation and we havent been falling out of sky in swarms.

Most of us learned to fly when the most advanced thing on our panels was a NAV/COM. Perhaps you entered the scene a bit later and had DME or even a rho-theta RNAV. Point is, few of us learned to fly in an airplane that had a display of any type.