Search Results for: ocean aire

(July 2011) When the carepages e-mail arrived among other messages, I wasn’t quite ready to open it. The last communication that I had received regarding John’s condition was through a phone conversation via his wife. With stoic control over the tone of her voice, Pam had discussed the involvement of hospice care. I clutched my […]

(December 2010) — High-frequency radio, used for beyond-the-horizon communication prior to the introduction of satellite relays, was subject to the whims of various ill-natured atmospheric elves and goblins; but when it was good it was very, very good, with the clarity and nuance of a fine telephone connection. So it is that I can still […]

I remember, back when I lived in Kentucky, watching news coverage one evening of a midair collision that had occurred that day. The TV news reporter was giving his report on the accident while standing in front of a tied-down Piper Archer at the local airport. The Archer had foam-backed, silver, reflective sunshades in all […]

There is frost accumulating inside the windows of my cockpit. I reach a gloved hand up and scrape a clear opening in the ice. The long, graceful lines of the left wing extend almost 50 feet into the impossibly thin air surrounding us. Normally when I fly, I’m off the surface of the planet, but […]

“It’ll take an act of God to get her a flight.” So went the first response to the U-2 pilots at Beale AFB who asked about getting me a flight in one of their two-seat training airplanes. In the end, it didn’t quite require an act of God. Only a signature from a three-star general. […]

The sight was breathtakingly sad. A middle-aged woman wearing a bright red blazer scurried across the tarmac to her waiting NetJets Cessna Encore. I sat on a bench just outside the entrance to our FBO, transfixed, wondering why she was hurrying. I had seen her before. A few minutes earlier I had watched as she […]

The late September rain is pounding on the fuselage above me and coursing across the narrow, rectangular windscreen that sits less than a foot in front of my face. The frigid Alaskan ocean lies only 400 feet beneath us, but if we went any higher, we’d be in the clouds-clouds that are obscuring a line […]

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 […]

||| |—|—| | | | At first glance, I don’t even recognize him. Nine years ago, Hank Potter was a vibrant, jolly soul, full of laughter, fire and stories of being Jimmy Doolittle’s navigator on the famous B-25 raid of Tokyo in 1942. Today, he and the 11 other “Doolittle Raiders” who were able to […]