Search Results for: living history flying day

Three years ago I wrote about an accident involving a pilot who became impatient waiting for a stratus layer to lift, and went out looking for a break (or its ambiguous cousin, a “thin spot”) through which he could climb to VFR on top. That accident took place in Los Angeles, and I described the […]

Today, the beginning pilot has many paths to choose from when learning to fly. There’s the Light Sport activity, which gets you going in a basic airplane. Then there is the recreational route which expands horizons a bit. Finally there’s the tried and true private certificate that expands piloting privileges by a lot. If initial […]

I know nothing about art or photography. Nothing. Can’t tell a Rauschenberg from a Rosenquist; a Diane Arbus from an Airbus. I do, though, have some favorite images that I store in my mind and, when I have the money and the wall space, in my home or office. Of course, most of these images […]

In May 1999, in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, a two-seat homebuilt GP-4 crashed shortly after takeoff, killing its 73-year-old builder and 60-year-old passenger. Both men were licensed pilots. The builder had logged 181.4 hours in the airplane since first flying it 15 months earlier. The weather at the time of the accident was clear and mild. According […]

In April, 2003, a Beech B200 King Air on approach to Fitchburg, Massachusetts, crashed about a mile from the airport. It had made a normal approach before overflying the runway, making a couple of steep turns and then diving into a single-story industrial building, penetrating the wall just below the roof. Of the King Air’s […]

What do the Wright Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Bell X-1 and the Apollo 11 Lunar Module have in common? Somehow, each of these flying machines managed to attain an honored place in aerospace history despite having small landing gear tires or none at all. This is a paradox of sorts, considering the […]

On the morning of a late fall day in 2000, a Utah rancher took up two passengers in his Cessna 175 to search for stray cattle. It was part of the fall roundup, an “annual event looked upon with anticipation by many.” After spotting a few head, they flew toward a bluff where several cowboys […]

||| |—|—| | | | 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 […]