Search Results for: Lear 45

“Let’s get one thing straight. There is a big difference between a pilot and an aviator. A pilot is a technician. An aviator is an artist in love with flight.” So said Elrey Borge Jeppesen. As I try to migrate from pilot to aviator, I’ve discovered, or I should say rediscovered, an important truth. It […]

Hurtling at high speed through the lower reaches of the stratosphere with the persistent roar of the turbofan engines reverberating mere feet from the passenger compartment and the ferocious rush of turbulent air blasting away against the fuselage, the typical business jet is anything but a sanctuary of peace and quietude on the inside. It’s […]

They say you never forget your first love, and for those of us who fly, there’s usually that one special airplane that first grabbed hold of us and seared itself into our memory like no other. With the countless different types of airplanes that have emerged since the dawn of flight, those first favorites can […]

It was late afternoon and time to fly home after a productive business meeting. Before heading to the airport, the pilot called Flight Service. Most of the significant weather was along a cold front just to the north of his east-west proposed route. The briefer mentioned some light snow showers were showing up on radar near the front. There were a few pilot reports of light to moderate icing, but all of them were associated with the weather to the north. The briefer alerted the pilot to an AIRMET for IFR conditions and mountain obscuration along a portion of his proposed route, but as of yet no en route advisories for structural icing had been issued.

Say what you like about pilots flying around with their heads up their MFDs rather than looking outside the cockpit, but when it comes to spotting traffic more than dozen wing-lengths from the airplane, a glance at traffic display is worth a hundred FAA-approved, 10-degree scans out the window.

We bought ice and Styrofoam chests at a Family Dollar store after leaving the Bourgeois Meat Market in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and packed them with crawfish boudin (sausage), headcheese and beef jerky. The boudin and headcheese (sounds gross but this stuff is a scrumptious pâté kind of thing) would be OK for a long time but […]

North Atlantic crossings to London have become such a frequent part of my repertoire that the ocean is now marked with a magenta line dotted with large directional arrows that say, “Les, this way!” Regardless of the routine, each trip has its own unique challenges. A trip this past January was no exception. It was […]

On Sept. 29, 2013, a Cessna Citation CJ2 landing at Santa Monica Airport near Los Angeles suddenly veered off the runway and crashed through a hangar, bursting into flames and killing all aboard. Three months later, on Jan. 5, 2014, the pilots of a Challenger 601 landing with a strong, gusting tailwind in Aspen, Colorado, […]

Fascination with creating the fastest airplanes has existed since the dawn of aviation. The first air races sprung up as early as 1909 and speed records quickly reached new highs, pushing aerodynamic engineers to reduce drag. As engine technology advanced, aircraft were designed around these new power plants, and over time the introduction of wind […]

Compared to landing, taking off is relatively simple. Our instructor lets us make the first takeoff of our very first flying lesson—or at least makes us think we made the takeoff. If everything goes right, it’s easy. But how do you know everything is going right? And how do you know what to do in the scant seconds available if something is going wrong?