Search Results for: view relative wind

It was late January 1962 and my sister Mary and I had been taking flying lessons for about a month, but I don’t think either of us had soloed yet. The Ercoupe — loaned to us by an incredibly generous friend — had sat forlornly in the weeds for some time, so there were issues: […]

The pilot in the left seat of the Piper Arrow was a 33,000-hour ATP; his right-seat companion had a private ticket and less than 200 hours. The two took off from Racine, Wisconsin, on a midsummer afternoon and headed northward, just off the western shore of Lake Michigan. There were scattered clouds at 3,400 feet […]

As the gear of the Mooney 201 thumped into the wheel wells, I squinted over the glareshield at a setting sun that was transforming the horizon into a postcard of purple, yellow and red. We climbed southwestward toward the VOR that established most of the routing around our airport. It wasn’t a 777, but just […]

(function(d, s, id) { if (d.getElementById(id)) return; var js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = ‘//cdn4.wibbitz.com/static.js’; d.getElementsByTagName(‘body’)[0].appendChild(js); }(document, ‘script’, ‘wibbitz-static-embed’)); While we can name hundreds of really smart, powerful, utilitarian or awesome airplanes, there are far, far fewer of them that we would call truly “beautiful.” What is it that makes an airplane an […]

Driving from Tampa, Florida, to KPBI for class at JetSuite’s Palm Beach base, Phil Smith and I are reunited for one last time. Indoc and sim partners for almost a month, we are both about to fly as first officers for the first time; each of us has been assigned to a “B” captain for […]

In 2010, I traveled to Haiti to deliver medical supplies in the aftermath of the powerful earthquake that leveled much of the area in and around impoverished Port-au-Prince. It was no surprise that the crew of a Quest Kodiak beat me there. After all, the Kodiak was created to serve as a primary workhorse for […]

When I set out to write a roundup of the Android apps available for aviation, I was ready for a quick assignment, as the words “Android” and “aviation” have not, up to now, been closely associated. Happily, this is changing. Today, there are several aviation apps with individual features that approach or, in some cases, […]

It’s been almost 20 years now that diesel technology has been a promising alternative for light general aviation, though the adoption of compression engines has taken longer and has suffered more teething pains than its proponents anticipated. I’ve had the chance to fly five different airplanes with four different diesel engines — the original Thielert, […]

Flying Magazine proudly introduces Top 100 Airplanes: Platinum Edition, which celebrates our Flying book, entitled Flight: 100 Greatest Aircraft. In creating the book, we decided to include some airplanes that should not have been left off the original Top 100 Airplanes list; the hard part was kicking out 20 great airplanes to make way for […]

Here are some of the distinctive airplanes that made Flying’s Top 100. For the full list, see the gallery at the bottom of the page. Flying Magazine is proud to introduce Flying‘s Top 100 Airplanes, a web-based compendium that names the 100 best, most significant and most compelling aircraft designs of all time. The list […]