Photos

The building that houses the Oakland Flight Service Station is nothing remarkable — just a square concrete structure at the northern end of Oakland Airport’s North Field. But it’s surrounded by history. Old, clapboard buildings from World War II line the airport frontage road that leads to the station. And side streets still carry names […]

Airframe icing has been a safety hazard since the first pilots flew in cold clouds, or in freezing precipitation. Can you imagine those early mail pilots trying to get across Pennsylvania in the winter with its lumpy terrain, perpetual cloud cover and freezing temperatures? With all of those leading edges, struts and flying wires to […]

Lindbergh did it alone in 33 hours, though that was eastbound. I did it 81 years later westbound, in a brand-new turboprop airplane, guided by an experienced transoceanic ferry pilot. It took four days. The experience was remarkable in very many ways; some were impressive technical aspects, others were extraordinary observations that are best categorized […]

Diamond, which a year ago seemed to have little to worry about beyond building enough airplanes to meet the demand, is scurrying these days to deal with a variety of challenges, not the least of which is a sharp drop-off in orders due to the global financial crisis. There has been some good news, though. […]

The fact that Gulfstream was working on a new super-midsize jet was one of the worst kept secrets in business aviation. Even though most speculation got the name right — the G250 — almost nobody predicted correctly how totally new the airplane would be before the formal announcement at the NBAA convention in Orlando in […]

If you’re historically inclined, you may be interested to know that the first swept-wing airplane appeared in 1907. It was built by J. W. Dunne, a gifted Irishman who also had some interesting ideas about the nature of Time. It had the distinction of being stable in all axes — uncapsizeable, in the boat-influenced language […]

Leon and I shook our heads as we stared at the line of airplanes in front of us that we had been instructed to follow. In contrast to the other line for JFK’s Runway 22 Right, our line wasn’t moving. The weather on the initial route was preventing our departure. The frustrating part was that […]

There are many things to love about the turbocharged Mooney Acclaim, more than 230 of those things, in fact, and the Type S follow-on has a few more to add to the mix, bringing the total, according to Mooney’s accounting, to 242 … knots, that is. The Continental TSIO-550-equipped Acclaim has been around for a […]