Pilots

I didn’t think it was such a crazy idea. My boyfriend’s 17-year-old son, Connor, had been expressing an interest in flying for the past couple of years. I’d promised him I’d take him up one day so he could get a better idea of what it was like, but Connor and his dad lived in […]

There’s a discount store, called the Dollar Store, where everything in the establishment goes for a dollar or less. This is not strictly true, for some items may reach two or even three dollars, but you get the point. This retailer suggests a metaphor for flying short distances. A lot of satisfaction can be had […]

I’m essentially a little airplane pilot, and only rarely have I “flown far out across the prairies of the sky to lands my fathers never knew and shores my kindred never trod,” but I think any pilot understands Gill Robb Wilson’s feelings about flying home for Christmas: I’ve blessed my wings a thousand times For […]

There are jobs in which you’re required to punch a time clock, and there are jobs in which your value is not measured in how long you do something but rather in what it is you do. So what does this have to do with aviation? Congress, in its questionable wisdom, has passed a law […]

A little over a year ago a good friend asked if I would consider writing a column about a skytyping/airshow operation. My friend was a former chief pilot at our New York domicile, and through the years the job had given him the opportunity to become acquainted with pilots that had unique backgrounds; one of […]

A couple of books I’ve been dipping into lately strike me as epitomizing some changes that have occurred in the past 50 or 60 years. One of them, Wolfgang Langewiesche’s classic Stick and Rudder, found its way to me through an old friend who, being well into his 80s, sold his airplane and with great […]

Maybe I’m hung up on stories about flying ridiculously close to the bottom edge of the air (aka “the ground”) but some are just too improbable and too whacko to be lost in the FAA’s big computer in Plano, Texas. Most complaints to the feds involve real or imaginary low-flying objects — airplanes, lawn chairs, […]

Minimums,” says Bob Owsley. The view isn’t encouraging. We can see the ground, or more accurately the water, but that’s about it. There is no sparkle to the gray surface of Lake Winnebago; it is a mirror of the dark clouds just 100 feet over our heads. Still, this is the most spectacular way to […]

The guy on the phone was a little vague about the availability of a crew car. “We got some T-6s coming in” was the only explanation forthcoming. Undeterred, we set off; there wasn’t much to lose. We were in a Cessna 210 and we were in Texas. By we I mean friends Rob and Kathy […]

After he “aced” the ground (oral) portion of a private check ride I gave last week, this young man pointed the airplane in approximately the right direction, found a couple of checkpoints and made a reasonable guess about our time to the next one listed on his flight log sheet. This with benefit of a […]