Pilots

The bright, very bright, sunlight flickered through the Mercury Tracer’s side window making a strobe light effect. The snow was piled high on the sides of the road and the sunlight on the snow was overwhelming my sunglasses. As I drove down the 19-degree hill, in the 19-degree weather, the combination of frost on the […]

Contempt and awe seldom wed, but height may make a match between them. One of the intermittent rewards of flying is the thought-provoking perspective it provides: We look down upon great cities reduced to anonymous gray smudges, or the lights of a solitary car speeding alone at midnight across a canvas of black velvet. The […]

In the early ’60s, when I went wrong and started hanging out at the aerodrome, common wisdom was that the DC-3, while a grand old airplane, had outlived its usefulness to the military, the airlines and even corporate operators. Its death knell was tolling to signal the time had come to relegate these antiques to […]

En route from Miami to Medellin, Colombia, the cockpit satellite phone rang on board Kalitta Air’s 747-200. Dispatch was calling with a request. A competitor’s 747 freighter was experiencing mechanical problems in Bogotá. The competitor would be unable to transport a large load of flowers back to the United States. Would the crew divert into […]

I remember, back when I lived in Kentucky, watching news coverage one evening of a midair collision that had occurred that day. The TV news reporter was giving his report on the accident while standing in front of a tied-down Piper Archer at the local airport. The Archer had foam-backed, silver, reflective sunshades in all […]

Larry Turley first decided he wanted to be a pilot when he was a teenager, working the line for an FBO in Augusta, Georgia, and the Master’s Golf Tournament came to town. “Arnold Palmer and the other pros landed their jets and pulled out gas credit cards,” Turley remembers with a laugh. “I’d never seen […]

One of my early childhood memories from growing up in Southern California is of my dad showing me a litho print of the A4-D Skyhawk in flight that he’d brought home from work at the Douglas Aircraft Company. As I looked at the image, I thought to myself, “How did they get that picture?” never […]

Rich Karlgaard is a late bloomer. At least, in terms of aviation. “I never had an itch to fly until I read a New York Times Sunday Magazine piece called “Turn Left at Cloud 109″ by James Fallows, which appeared on Thanksgiving weekend in 1999,” says Karlgaard. “It was about Cirrus. A couple of days […]

The equatorial sun is just rising over an acacia tree beyond the thatched roof aircraft shelter at Lewa Downs’ Wilderness Trails airstrip as I stow my gear and climb into the right seat of Will Craig’s Piper Saratoga. “There’s nothing like seeing this land early in the morning,” he says with a smile as he […]

Flying in Kenya Due to the challenging nature of the flying, paperwork requirements and the scarcity of airplanes (and spare parts) in Kenya, it is extremely difficult for American pilots to rent planes in Kenya or fly themselves around the country. But there are still ways for pilots to get some flying time there and […]