Pilot Proficiency

Almost 50 years ago, Nancy and I and a couple other would-be hippies, brother and sister, flew to Baja California, Mexico, in a Beech Musketeer, N298M. Whatever happens to obliterate airplanes must have happened to that Musketeer, because N298M is now a Cessna. My philosophy of travel is to leave as much as possible to […]

December is the cruelest month in the Culebra Range of southern Colorado. This chain of lofty mountains is rugged terrain, where the raging winds of winter have caught several airplanes in downdrafts. in my Navion, I have sniffed out the range’s updrafts and downflows, trying to identify weather conditions leading to airplane disasters and to […]

It turns out that aircraft owners who upgrade their cockpits with the latest glass-panel avionics share some interesting similarities with shoppers for smartphones, flat-screen TVs, laptops or just about any other broadly adopted consumer electronics product.When the first smartphones hit the market several years ago they were cumbersome to use, lacked capabilities and cost a […]

Whether you’re flying to the Maine coastline to add your name to the list of the 3 million annual visitors to Acacia National Park or to try to decide which restaurants really are the 10 best for lobster in the region, you might come face to face with the RNAV (GPS) Runway 22 for an […]

I wasn’t looking for nice. I was a 14-year-old, eagerly flipping through a vintage Playboy magazine I found in a thrift store in upstate New York while my parents looked at an old rug in the next room. But still, the illustration—a carefree blonde, a man in uniform, both astride a Honda motorcycle carrying them […]

“Hey, Dick. Just so you know, the airport is closed.” It’s Max calling from the FBO in Lebanon, New Hampshire, about an hour before our proposed takeoff time. “There’s ice on the runway; they are scraping it now. If we can just get a little more sun, it won’t take long before they’ll open 18/36.” […]

Despite an industry inhabited with thousands of gigantic egos, most aviation folk will probably admit, some secretly, that they wish they had a mentor, a guide to prevent them from falling into any of the thousands of professional pits waiting for the unsuspecting or poorly educated. Who wouldn’t like advice from someone who has been […]

With approximately one-third of its annual 128,200 operations traffic count consumed by airline operations and the rest split between air taxi, general aviation and military operations, Boise, Idaho (BOI), demands pilots be on their toes for traffic of all shapes and sizes when visiting. This month’s ILS Y 10 Right approach comes equipped with a […]

I have been hearing about the $100 hamburger since long before I had a pilot certificate. The phrase itself is meant to conjure up the absurdity/passion surrounding aviation, but it always made perfect sense to me. The dream of becoming a pilot was not about access to remote and exotic locations, but rather to visit […]

Pilots are endowed with the right to take risks.