June-July 2020

Every summer for several years, I have been flying my Varga from my home base about 25 miles south of San Francisco—San Carlos, California—to Ashland, Oregon, to take in a play at the Shakespeare Festival and then proceed to Idaho for some camping. The Varga is a low-wing, two-place, tandem-seat airplane with a 150 hp […]

Understanding what’s happening at Icon Aircraft today demands a quick look at continuous quality improvement, a culture-driven process widely used in automobile manufacturing to help companies manage an unwieldy production process often caused by rising costs, poor planning or a lack of innovation. But continuous improvement isn’t simply about cost cutting. It’s also about refining […]

In 1980, as a local banker for 15 years, I was asked by the bank’s directors to become more involved in community affairs—specifically, to take over the position of chairman of finance on the executive board of the Boy Scouts of America in our town of Greenwich, Connecticut. In that position, I was responsible for the finances […]

The Brazilian OEM celebrated its golden anniversary in 2020 by giving its popular business jet some impressive enhancements.

If you don’t know where it went, is it really gone?

In “When to Give Up,” an article from several years ago, I recommended giving serious thought before every takeoff about how to handle an emergency. Rather than trying for a “miracle save,” it was usually better to accept the unpleasant certainty of bending some metal but probably surviving. The classic example is losing an engine […]

Turning to Bart Jones, who was sitting beside me in the cockpit as we flew over the Florida coast, I told him the battery wasn’t working in my headset. The whomp that active noise reduction creates when the power’s going made for quite a distraction. After a beat, and with a nonchalant shrug, he took […]

I was quite young when I first fell in love with gliding. It may have been even before I fell in love with Cecilia Revilla, who sat in front of me in the fourth grade. When I say gliding, I don’t mean flying a sailplane; I was much too young for that. I mean just […]

One of the most common questions asked of me as an airline pilot—and now as a former one—is, “Did you ever have any really close calls?” My coy response is usually, “The espresso maker on the Triple Seven quit just as we reached our North Atlantic oceanic entry point after departing from London.” The inquiries […]

The dream of achieving a pilot certificate is one that some people think is impossible, particularly if the cost of flight instruction feels like a challenging barrier. While many pilots save up or take out loans to pay their way, there are other roads to the ultimate destination that not only lower the cost—and in […]