Search Results for: adventure pilot

The late September rain is pounding on the fuselage above me and coursing across the narrow, rectangular windscreen that sits less than a foot in front of my face. The frigid Alaskan ocean lies only 400 feet beneath us, but if we went any higher, we’d be in the clouds-clouds that are obscuring a line […]

When the poet Robert Burns wrote, “the best laid schemes o’ mice and men, gang aft a-gley,” what he meant was that things often don’t work out the way we intend. The well laid plan was for Robert Goyer to fly up to Columbia County to take some pictures of me with my Cardinal. That […]

||| |—|—| | | | A man approached me in the Flying tent at the EAA’s AirVenture airshow last summer and thanked me for, as he put it, “working a miracle in my life.” He explained that his wife, who in 20 years of marriage had never been willing to go flying with him, had […]

||| |—|—| | | | The notes are cryptic; scattered snapshots of a life that would mean very little to anyone except me. Two words-“By myself”-are all that denote the cascade of emotions, experience, fear, excitement and joy that accompanied my first solo in my Cessna 120 taildragger. “Familiarization,” reads another stoic entry explaining 15 […]

||| |—|—| | | | It seemed such an innocuous decision at the time. Life had gotten a bit much, I was behind schedule, the late August weather patterns looked bad, and I needed to get home to California for some meetings. “Well,” I thought. “I’ll just leave the airplane in New York for now […]

||| |—|—| | | | At first, I was decidedly bummed at the timing. I’d agreed to fly my Cheetah to Peterborough, Canada, east of Toronto, to give a talk there on the 7th of July. It seemed a good excuse to take the Cheetah on an adventure and see parts of the country, and […]

||| |—|—| | | | At first glance, I don’t even recognize him. Nine years ago, Hank Potter was a vibrant, jolly soul, full of laughter, fire and stories of being Jimmy Doolittle’s navigator on the famous B-25 raid of Tokyo in 1942. Today, he and the 11 other “Doolittle Raiders” who were able to […]

The equatorial sun is just rising over an acacia tree beyond the thatched roof aircraft shelter at Lewa Downs’ Wilderness Trails airstrip as I stow my gear and climb into the right seat of Will Craig’s Piper Saratoga. “There’s nothing like seeing this land early in the morning,” he says with a smile as he […]

Flying in Kenya Due to the challenging nature of the flying, paperwork requirements and the scarcity of airplanes (and spare parts) in Kenya, it is extremely difficult for American pilots to rent planes in Kenya or fly themselves around the country. But there are still ways for pilots to get some flying time there and […]

Craftsmen in Kansas riveted together my old Cessna 120 many years before I was born. On quiet evening flights I would sometimes think about that, imagining the men who had built her and the pilots who had flown her before my mom even knew my dad’s name. Sometimes I almost thought that if I listened […]