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As a kid who grew up with the new math, I learned early on to look at numbers in new and different ways. So I was well prepared, it seems, to take an objective look at a different model of small aircraft ownership, fractionals. The idea behind fractional ownership is to give the airplane’s many […]

When newly formed Tiger Aircraft announced a few years back that it was going to reintroduce the four-seat AG-5B Tiger, last produced back in 1993, it seemed like a natural. Unlike a number of more forgettable and more obscure airplanes that have been returned to production (sometimes successfully, more often not) since the bust of […]

It’s an old question: can fractional ownership work for small airplanes? Over the last 30 years or so, it’s been tried numerous times. Sure, the terminology has changed, from “rent-a-plane,” to “time-shares,” to today’s “fractional ownership,” but the concept has remained essentially the same. Take an airplane and split its purchase price among several owners, […]

||| |—|—| | | | The title of this column is “Gear Up” because I like the symbolism of takeoff and flight. It means to me the moment just after positive rate has been established when, with a short upward pull by the pilot, the airplane is reconfigured, while accelerating, to assume the shape it […]

I don’t know if there are 10,000 lakes in Central Florida to match Minnesota’s famous license-plate claim, but I wouldn’t be surprised. As I flew over the region in the Saratoga on my way down to Sun ‘n Fun, I looked down at a landscape freckled with lakes, lakes big and small, blue and green, […]

||| |—|—| | | | Pilots and controllers are doing a pretty good job of keeping airplanes apart on the runway. During the four-year period from 1997 to 2000 there were 266 million takeoff and landing operations at the country’s 459 tower-controlled airports, and only 1,369 of those operations involved a runway incursion. That means […]