My infatuation with Stearmans began at 7 years old, when, while piled into the back of our Oldsmobile Cutlass station wagon on a family road trip to Florida, I spied a barnstormer in a brilliant blue-and-yellow airplane plying his trade from a nearby airstrip. I pleaded for my parents to let me take a ride, […]
Dear me, I must be a glutton for punishment. Hot on the heels of declaring that “Taildraggers Suck” (not everyone got the tongue-in-cheek humor behind the column’s title or necessarily read any further), I’m about to reach out and grab the third rail of aviation opinion: warbirds. As I recall, Martha Lunken took some serious […]
In what must have been a desperate attempt to meet gender quotas, the FAA hired me as an inspector in the Chicago O’Hare Air Carrier District Office in 1980. Six months later, somebody realized I knew absolutely nothing about jets or air carrier operations and farmed me out to the DuPage General Aviation District Office (GADOs then, […]
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