Search Results for: sky high gear inc

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 […]

The folks at Adam Aircraft don’t particularly like it when their new airplane is referred to as a “push-pull,” the most common (and cleanest) name attached to the Cessna Skymaster that made its debut about 40 years ago. The concept of centerline thrust, tandem power, was actually patented by Claudius Dornier in 1937 and developed […]

It was a disparate group of musicians, artists, pilots and friends attending Craig Peyton’s art exhibit called “Environmental Forms.” As diverse as the members of the group were, they had one thing in common-their enthusiasm. It was contagious. The multimedia exhibit combined three of Craig’s loves-music, photography and aviation-and was composed of six video segments […]

My Jeppesen Private Pilot Manual tells student pilots that radio communication is very serious stuff. “When speaking on the radio,” the good book says, “it is important to speak in a professional manner. Radio transmissions should be as brief as possible to help avoid frequency congestion. Incorrect radio procedures can compromise your safety and the […]

Are the $100 hamburgers getting old? Have you visited every airport restaurant within 100 miles so many times that the staff greets you by name and has your favorite meal ready? Did you already give all your friends rides, so that you are now reduced to approaching people on the street, like the press gangs […]

I don’t know his name, and I didn’t quite catch his N-number. But somewhere in the San Francisco area, there’s a pilot who owes me an apology. I was flying my Cheetah down to the Oakland International Airport on July 4th to pick up a friend who was flying in for a visit. It was […]

The late Ed Heinemann was a designer at Douglas Aircraft. He was responsible for the A-4 Skyhawk, a single-seater with an empty weight of less than 10,000 pounds that served for a long time as the smallest carrier-based attack aircraft in the Navy’s arsenal. It embodied the now-famous design philosophy emblazoned on Heinemann’s office wall: […]

I’m sick of the term “pilot error.” A true pilot error is a rare event. But what is so often labeled a pilot error is actually a pilot decision that didn’t result in the outcome expected by the pilot, the regulators or the public. Real pilot errors can only occur in transport-category airplanes that are […]

The equatorial sun is just rising over an acacia tree beyond the thatched roof aircraft shelter at Lewa Downs’ Wilderness Trails airstrip as I stow my gear and climb into the right seat of Will Craig’s Piper Saratoga. “There’s nothing like seeing this land early in the morning,” he says with a smile as he […]