Search Results for: maintaining your airplane

The folks at your flying club mean well, but sometimes their advice isn’t on the mark.

One of my fondest memories in aviation was the first flight I took in a Skyhawk. Even though my parents kept a kindergarten assignment where I said my goal in life was to be a pilot (after my career as an astronaut and a monster truck driver), I did not pursue aviation until after my […]

Michael Wildes says when pilots gain more experience, some let their guard down—sometimes to chilling effect.

For as long as I’ve been eating solid foods, I’ve had a dream car—and the conviction that it would one day be mine. It began with the Lamborghini Countach, which was first produced in 1974, when I was 2 years old. I found it a few years later in a MotorTrend magazine my father left […]

Jason McDowell gives some sage advice about narrowing down the choices and managing the allure of rare types when you’re trying to pick out your airplane.

Departures into low clouds might not be your thing, and that’s fine. Staying on the ground is the ultimate risk mitigation for absolutely any concern. But departing in IMC is common practice and can mean anything below three statute miles of visibility and/or ceilings below 1000 feet. That’s a wide weather window when deciding if […]

When researching various aircraft types for Flying, I encounter a wide variety of owners with an even wider variety of stories. Most recently, I met with the owner of a taildragger who agreed to take me up for a demonstration flight to help me evaluate the type for an article I was writing. As he […]

A good landing is any landing you walk away from. A great landing is when you can use the airplane again. Who doesn’t enjoy the classics? As humorous as these sayings can be, they occasionally do contain some nuggets of wisdom. For example, I would consider Captain Sully’s landing in the Hudson River a good landing, […]

There’s a truism that applies to owning machines like boats and airplanes: The two best days of your life are the day you buy it and the day you sell it. In between, so the story goes, your ownership will be a maelstrom of inspections, repairs and downtime, punctuated by frustrations and anxieties, along with […]

As I stood on the Textron Aviation ramp in Wichita, Kansas, for my first look at the company’s new turboprop flagship, the King Air 360, I slipped back in time to a different era and form of transportation: cars (muscle cars as they called them). My pal Lennie had just bought a brand-new, fire-engine-red Chevrolet […]