Pilot Proficiency

Olive Branch—in Mississippi— might not be a city that easily rolls off the tongue of pilots everywhere, but as the crow flies, Olive Branch Airport (KOLV) is just 26 miles from Memphis International (KMEM), home base to package-delivery giant FedEx. That airline alone adds some 450 daily operations to KMEM. But KMEM’s nearly 230,000 annual operations include plenty of […]

My relationship with the mountains began on hikes with my family, camping trips up into the farthest corners of Glacier National Park that could be reached with a 7-year-old (me) and a toddling 4-year-old (my little brother) in close formation. We took what we could carry in our little packs—supplemented heavily with the resources my […]

Gallipolis is a town in extreme southeastern Ohio—not to be confused with the World War I battle site on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey. This one got its name in 1790, when some Frenchmen (“Gallia”) established a village or city (“polis”) across from where West Virginia’s Kanawha River joins the mighty Ohio. They’d been discovered […]

By the fall of 1978 I’d worked for Piper Aircraft in Lakeland, Florida, for three years. I was the assistant chief engineer-technical, which meant I had the people in the structures, aerodynamics, power plants, systems, electrical/avionics and flight-test groups all working for me. At the time, we were working extremely hard to certify the new […]

When the jet age arrived in 1959, little was known about wind shear. Aviation was focused on thunderstorm avoidance. In Joseph George’s compilation of Eastern Air Line’s forecasting techniques from that era, we find thunderstorms described in terms of turbulence, icing, and hail hazards. As jet aircraft were equipped with radar, it was assumed that […]

Do you believe the Earth is warming? I do. Do you believe that man contributes to this warming trend? I do, but I don’t know how much. Do you believe that the Earth’s supply of fossil fuels is finite? I do. Do you believe that aviation contributes to climate change? I do—but not as much […]

Before GPS, when Rand McNally’s paper maps ruled the day, pulling over on a country road in a small town to ask for directions never felt like failure to me. I saw it as a chance to meet someone new, maybe find out where to get lunch. Likewise, when flying, I am not a man […]

If you are anything like me, an abrupt and bouncy touchdown on a gusty day leaves a lingering frustration. I can do better. I’ve found that I’m not alone in the realm of self-criticism: Most pilots have a healthy relationship to judging one’s own performance—and boasting about it to boot. Are we always ahead of […]

Almost 50 years ago, Nancy and I and a couple other would-be hippies, brother and sister, flew to Baja California, Mexico, in a Beech Musketeer, N298M. Whatever happens to obliterate airplanes must have happened to that Musketeer, because N298M is now a Cessna. My philosophy of travel is to leave as much as possible to […]

December is the cruelest month in the Culebra Range of southern Colorado. This chain of lofty mountains is rugged terrain, where the raging winds of winter have caught several airplanes in downdrafts. in my Navion, I have sniffed out the range’s updrafts and downflows, trying to identify weather conditions leading to airplane disasters and to […]