Search Results for: angel hope

It was a cruddy day to go mountain flying. A ragged gray overcast stretched over Western Washington State, high enough to make for good VFR under the deck near Spokane, but it promised to be a more complicated journey to the east, where the spine of the Bitterroots juts out, rising to 10,000 feet at […]

I have visited a certain old house on the south coast of Massachusetts almost every summer for the past 20 years, and have known Sam, its owner, for almost half a century now. He is an excellent fellow — thoughtful, erudite, articulate, earthily funny, worldly wise, impatient of pretension, as apt to quote Cummings as […]

On the evening before announcing he is leaving Eclipse, Vern Raburn took another stage at EAA AirVenture with a decidedly more upbeat message. He serves on the advisory board of Icon Aircraft, a Los Angeles company that hopes to produce its A5 light sport amphibian. The Icon A5 is a two-seat, folding-wing, trailer-capable amphibian with […]

Some readers might remember that starting back about five years I wrote a series of articles about my experiences flying with two separate small airplane fractional ownership operations: OurPlane and AirShares Elite. The experiences were very positive, and I came to believe that shared ownership (as it came to be called) would be a major […]

Last April, an instrument-rated private pilot took off from Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport in his SR22 bound for Palm Beach International. It was solid IFR, 400 overcast. The pilot was experienced in Cirrus airplanes-he was a founder of the Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association-he regularly flew such IFR flights, and he knew his airplane well. […]

“If we don’t start moving soon,” I find myself thinking as my frustration simmers into overboil, “I swear to God I’m going to scream.” I’m sitting in the middle of the I-580 freeway, which currently looks more like a big valet parking lot that just happens to be four traffic lanes wide. I’ve been on […]

In the reception area at Burt Rutan’s Mojave, California, skunk works, Scaled Composites, there sits on a corner table a small black tripod with a cup-shaped receptacle on top. Built by composites engineer Stan Stawski, who works at Scaled, it supported two tons before failing. It weighs less than four ounces. Getting the most strength […]

I recently finished a half-year evaluation of the OurPlane fractional ownership program, taking control of an eighth share in a brand-new Cessna Skylane. I was looking to see if fractional ownership programs, which are modeled loosely after those used for professionally flown business jets, like NetJets, could translate to owner-flown small airplanes. The OurPlane program […]

It is a cliché, but time does fly when you are having fun. Interesting is fun, and almost nine really interesting years have passed since I got one of the first (if not the first other than a manufacturer) approvals for GPS approaches. The FAA approval is dated 7/25/94. That first unit, a Garmin GPS […]

If, as hoary nautical tradition holds, it’s bad luck to rename a ship, then the poor old SS Sea Breeze was damned and damned again. The midsize (606 feet) cruise ship began life in 1958 as the Federico C, designed for service out of Genoa for immigrants heading to new lives in Buenos Aires and […]