Search Results for: build your own airplane

I can’t believe we’re doing this!” Kimberly’s laughing voice sails through the air from somewhere behind me as our horses canter through the ponderosa pines of an Oregon trail. I don’t answer immediately, because just staying in the saddle is taking up most of my focus at the moment. But I laugh, inside and out. […]

There was a long list of things that needed to be done to Melmoth 2 before leaving for Oshkosh. One was to get a coat of paint onto the airplane. This I barely managed to accomplish in time, using roller, brush and a marine paint formulated for sailboats being finished, I suppose, at the ends […]

The FAA has conducted a study among pilots to determine how they use Flight Service Stations. The agency also hopes to determine what we like and don’t like about the FSS. Bottom line: the FAA is looking for reasons, or even cover, to radically change the FSS, or even eliminate it. The FAA’s reason for […]

It was supposed to be such an easy flight. Oh, there was some weather that was supposed to move in that evening, but I’d called Flight Service five minutes before leaving for the airport, and they’d told me it was clear below 12,000 feet, with 10 miles visibility all along my route. And forecast to […]

Neither the acting nor the writing would win an Academy Award. “Well gosh, Wilbur, how come you get to be interviewed? I’m the one who flew it!” pouts a blond middle-school student with magic-marker facial hair. “Hey. Orville. Who’s older?” retorts his “brother,” a lanky, brown-haired 13-year-old. “You are.” “So who do you think is […]

Graduations are always a combination of happiness celebrating a job well done and sadness that a big part of the lives of everyone involved has come to an end. Over the four years our daughter Karen spent at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, my Baron was involved in every phase. Karen had […]

Part 1 of a 3-part series on the AirShares Elite small-airplane fractional ownership program, here on flyingmag.com. Last year I did a long-term evaluation of a small-airplane fractional ownership program run by OurPlane. During the nine-month period, I was for all intents and purposes an OurPlane owner, flying a new Cessna 182 along with the […]

My first introduction to Chicago politics occurred during a huge snowstorm in 1979. To my bewilderment, none of the streets in our neighborhood, save one, got plowed by the city. It turned out that the district in which I lived had not voted “appropriately” in the last election. The retribution for this bad behavior was […]

In more than 30 years of flying I have flown only a handful of ILS approaches with the weather right at minimums. The same is true for most pilots. I think the reason is that the weather seldom cooperates. Fog frequently drops the visibility well below the required minimums, but mist, drizzle and rain usually […]

“Hey, Dick, whatever happened to your Mustang purchase?” I hear this all the time. And, after reporting in the January issue that I’d plunked down $10,000 at the NBAA Convention as a down payment on Cessna’s new jet, I got a burst of mail, not all of it supportive. So I thought I’d tell you […]