Search Results for: Ercoupe

It’s been said that you don’t actually remember an event from your past; what you recall is your last memory of it. Maybe, but I’ve kept little day books since about 1970, so I can usually reconstruct events with some degree of accuracy — both fortunate and unfortunate because it’s all there, the good and […]

Somewhere among all your stuff, there’s undoubtedly a stash of old logbooks. Mine are on a bookcase in the den—except the most recent of six, which is sitting open on the dining-room table, patiently waiting to be updated. It’s been several years since that’s happened, but I keep stickers for flight reviews and jot down […]

Congress created the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1915 “to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight with a view to their practical solution.” What would eventually become the world’s largest and most productive aeronautical-research establishment began as a committee of 12 unpaid men with a budget of $5,000 per […]

Since competing in a local air race a few weeks back, on the heels of the Kentucky Derby and the Indianapolis 500, I’ve been ­wondering if this ­fascination—this lust to ­compete—is just part of our DNA. Are we ­genetically programmed to pit ourselves against each other to prove who’s the fastest, the most ­cunning, the […]

if youve been around general aviation for any time at all, by now you should not be surprised to learn that attempted VFR flight into instrument metereological conditions (IMC) and its close cousin, loss of visual references at night, consistently rank as the most lethal type of GA accidents. Although the numbers (thank goodness!) have recently begun to decline, about seven out of every eight-nearly 90 percent-of those accidents are still fatal. Thats largely because, as current NTSB Vice Chairman Bruce Landsberg puts it, they tend to end in flight into terrain, either controlled or (more often) uncontrolled. In both cases, prospects for survival are meager.

Late in 1932, the newborn Beech Aircraft Co. flew its first product, a five-seat biplane with a 420 hp radial engine and fixed landing gear enclosed in huge fairings. Walter Beech gave it model number 17, since the last model built by the Travel Air company, which he had founded in 1925 with an all-star […]

An acquaintance named Mark Burton recently sent me a copy of his book about an airport owned and operated by his family called Brownie’s. A few days later, I met a guy at a party who regaled me (unsolicited) with wild and woolly tales about flying out of a now defunct airport called Brownie’s with […]

Richard L. “Dick” Collins, a prolific aviation journalist whose career spanned 60 years, nearly half of it on the masthead of Flying magazine including more than a decade in the 1970s through the late 1980s as editor-in-chief, died on Sunday at his home in suburban Maryland. He was 84. Born on November 28, 1933, Collins […]

A beautiful Wolf Samson biplane, a larger version of the Pitts and the only one flying today, returned to the skies over the weekend. The airplane is owned by Tim Just of Apple Valley, California, who recently imported the airplane from Germany where it has lived since it was built by renowned airplane-builder Steve Wolf […]

October 1, 2017, Klamath Falls, Ore.Cirrus Design SR22At about 1043 Pacific time, the airplane was destroyed when it impacted terrain while maneuvering in a remote mountainous area. The private pilot and the passenger received fatal injuries. Instrument conditions were reported in the area at the time of the accident.