Adventures & More

(April 2011) AFTER DEPOSITING MY wallet, cell phone, parts of my uniform and various other sundries into the required plastic bins, I walked through the arch of the security magnetometer. I shuddered, fearing an activation of the chirping beep that would force me to succumb to a re-entry. I would then be required to remove […]

(April 2011) THE DESIRE FOR CERTAIN knowledge drives airplane designers to many decimal places, even though a whiff of wind can blow them all away. And so, when finally, after years of procrastinating, I got my homebuilt’s flaps working, I wanted to measure their effect as exactly as I could. No doubt if I had […]

(April 2011) Coincidentally (maybe) I’m writing this on the anniversary of the day Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. He was later declared a heretic by the Diet of Worms, a bunch of church guys who met in a German town with a really funny name. It’s possible that posting […]

(April 2011) IT WAS PART 2 OF A MONTH’S worth of airplane (commercial and private) travel, and though I was seated in posh surroundings in the nose of a KLM 747-400 bound from Los Angeles to Amsterdam, the prisoners began to stir. Our departure had been delayed more than four hours. I worried about my […]

_(__April 2011)_ BY NOW I HOPE YOU’VE heard of the plan by a company called LightSquared to install as many as 40,000 stations across the continental United States that would transmit on the frequency band directly adjacent to the one used by GPS. LightSquared’s plan is to create, using this quiet little corner of the […]

(April 2011) REMEMBER THE RIDE BOARDS at school? Students with cars would post notices of where they were headed during school breaks and invite other students to ride along. At the same time students looking for rides would post their trip requests. The system, with the notices thumbtacked to a bulletin board, worked well, and […]

(March 2011) TOSSING OBJECTS FROM flying machines, stuff like flour bombs, candy, inflated balloons, the ashes of friends, rolls of toilet paper and Tootsie Pop wrappers (yeah, I know that’s tacky), an art reserved to pilots of relatively simple, unpressurized airplanes, is surely one of flying’s greatest joys. C’mon, what kind of fun can you […]

(March 2011) ON OCCASION, I AM ASKED if we airline types actually monitor guard frequency — 121.5. My stock answer is “Of course.” And for the most part, I’m telling the truth. However, in some circumstances it’s not practical. What are those circumstances? I don’t want to speak for all my colleagues, but below 10,000 […]

(March 2011) I TRY TO BE TOLERANT OF OTHERS, but sometimes it’s hard, especially when it comes to people who are envious. As all you fans of medieval thought are aware, envy is No. 6 with a bullet on the list of the Seven Deadly Sins. And the idea of envy being a bad thing […]

(March 2011) WRITING ABOUT ADVENTURE – whether the adventure is climbing a mountain, fighting a war or flying a small airplane across the country – is something of a challenge. Not because the source material is lacking. To the contrary. But there’s a reason explorers and generals who cared about recording their battles for history […]