I Learned About Flying From That

FLYING will soon air its 100th ILAFFT podcast episode. To celebrate this remarkable milestone, we’re counting down listeners’ favorites.

A pilot flies through an incident with grief on his shoulders.

When you share you experiences and knowledge with your passengers they may catch the aviation bug.

When hazy conditions combine with clouds of snow geese, a pilot learns the value of over communicating and ADS-B.

In fall 1967, I was a Marine second lieutenant and completed my first solo in a Navy T-34. After a couple of times around the pattern, the instructor got out, slapped me on the helmet, and told me to make three touch-and-goes and come back to pick him up. In fall 2017, I completed my […]

Many years ago, a friend landed and left his Cessna 172 in Louisville, Kentucky, because of weather, an hour and half away from our home-base airport in Madisonville. He was far too busy in his business to go back and fly it home anytime soon. As a newly minted 17-year-old private pilot, I jumped at […]

The flight began normally. Little did I know how crazy and funny things would end up becoming. It was my student’s last flight before his first check ride in the private pilot portion of our Part 141 curriculum, which comes just before a student’s first solo. We were flying a Cessna 152. We had a […]

In 1948, living in New Jersey, I wanted very much to get into flying. My inquiries led me to Secaucus (now a metropolis in its own right, 10 minutes from New York City), where I found the Dawn Patrol seaplane base located on the Hackensack River. The owner-operator was a veteran Navy pilot, who just a […]

It was my first flying job—the one you dreamed about having all your life. The one for which you strove, saved and worked so hard, and it was finally real. I had to leave my native New Zealand and move to the Australian Outback to get it, but that just made it all the more […]

A lot has been written over the past few years about pilots relying on the automation to fly the airplane to the detriment of actual hands-on-the-stick piloting skills. I have long been baffled by pilots’ reliance on the autopilot. But perhaps this attitude comes from my Air Force training early on and particularly from a […]