Taking Wing

I can’t really say I know Sarah Rovner, because we’ve never actually met. We’re both airline pilots, we have a bunch of mutual friends in common, we presented at the same aviation conference (one day apart) and we’ve chatted online and on the telephone. But mostly I “know” Sarah because we’re Facebook friends and she […]

The sun is shining and the fish are calling, but it’s online catch-up day on Windbird. We spent the past week at beautiful, isolated Conception Island, Bahamas: No people, no internet — it was heaven on earth. The news headlines that greeted Dawn and me upon our return made us wish we’d stayed a little […]

One of the things I love about living and cruising aboard Windbird is the way it drastically simplifies and slows the frenetic pace of modern life. Where most of my flights are of a few hours’ duration, passages under sail are measured in days and weeks. Three hours on watch, three hours off, ad infinitum […]

It was the perfect Minnesota fall day, golden and breezy with a hint of the smell of wood smoke in the air, and just enough warmth to assist one in maintaining a certain healthy denial of the bitter months to come. I drove out to Flying Cloud Airport (KFCM) with my 8-year-old nephew Dylan in […]

My infatuation with Stearmans began at 7 years old, when, while piled into the back of our Oldsmobile Cutlass station wagon on a family road trip to Florida, I spied a barnstormer in a brilliant blue-and-yellow airplane plying his trade from a nearby airstrip. I pleaded for my parents to let me take a ride, […]

I grew up and learned to fly on the snow-swept plains of Minnesota, but I really grew up in the crowded, smoggy skies over Southern California. It’s where I spent a couple of lean years flight instructing and freight dogging, making lifelong friends while scrambling to make ends meet on some vanishingly small paychecks. I […]

An old TWA captain once told me that the definition of a successful aviation career is when the chief pilot meets your retirement flight and wonders aloud, “Who the heck are you?” There’s some good advice buried in that witticism, and I’ve tried to live by it over the course of my career. I had […]

Ah, summer, the season of the good life. The season of verdant, rolling hills speckled with lazily grazing cattle, of smoky backyard burgers and grilled corn on the cob, of golden beaches replete with giggling children, bronzed skin and the tangy bouquet of salt air and sunscreen. I hope you enjoyed the summer just passed […]

I don’t know about you, but I sure love being proved right. Lord knows it happens rarely enough at home, so I have to look for small victories elsewhere. As it so happens, writing a ­monthly column for a widely read ­aviation magazine makes for a potentially rich vein of retrospective sagacity. Thus I was […]

I’ve been reading this magazine for two-thirds of my life, ever since I was an eager-eyed lad of 12. Back then, the arrival of Flying‘s newest issue was a highlight of my month. I’d read Len Morgan first, then Gordon Baxter, then Mac McClellan, Dick Collins and Peter Garrison, and then everything else. I had […]