Grumman

As on all major holidays, July 4, 2015, was a day to take my beloved Grumman Yankee out to stretch her legs and keep my flying skills proficient. Never did I expect that this would be a day of reckoning and facing up to my first inflight mechanical failure in more than 36 years of flying. […]

(January 2011) — The envelope had been forwarded twice by the time it got to me. I tore open the top seal and pulled out a worn 8½- by 11-inch color brochure, its binding coming apart, with a cryptic note paper-clipped to its top edge, asking for the brochure to be forwarded on to me. […]

(January 2011) — It was my good friend Paul’s second airplane ride. The airplane was a bright red Grumman AA-1 Yankee, my favorite of all the ones owned by the Orlando Aero Club at the time. Quick and responsive, it was my kind of airplane. On this particular flight, we were flying out of Page […]

I’m not sure who first came up with the term “spam can” to designate a basic, fixed-tricycle-gear, aluminum airplane. Spam itself originated in the late 1930s, and Hormel, the manufacturer of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous pork shoulder/ham product, actually started calling it “Spam” to make it sound jazzier. It needn’t have bothered. One of the defining characteristics […]

As I think back over my life, I can come up with only one day I remember. Really remember. Oh, I remember graduating from high school, but I don’t remember anything else about the day. I remember watching the birth of my daughter, but I have no idea what I had for breakfast on that […]