Technicalities

My friend Longbridge has been working for years—these things always take far longer than you think they will—on a Lancair 320 with a lot of airframe mods, the most conspicuous of which are a double-slotted Fowler flap, enlarged empennage surfaces, and leading-edge cuffs on the outer panels of the wings. And then there are the […]

Three-quarters of the globe behind them, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, now had only the Pacific Ocean left to cross. They took off midmorning from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on July 1, 1937, bound for Howland Island, an 8,200-foot-long, paramecium-shaped speck halfway to Honolulu. A runway had been carved out on the uninhabited […]

Not all performance calculations are as specific as we think.

In summer 1954, I was 10 going on 11; the “going on” part is important when you’re 10. My father was in New York for some reason or another, and my mother and I were to join him there for a month. It was the first great travel adventure of my life. Born and living […]

I was quite young when I first fell in love with gliding. It may have been even before I fell in love with Cecilia Revilla, who sat in front of me in the fourth grade. When I say gliding, I don’t mean flying a sailplane; I was much too young for that. I mean just […]

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 […]

JetBlue announced in January that it intended to become a carbon-neutral airline. To reduce its net carbon footprint, it would begin purchasing carbon offsets—credits generated by sponsoring activities and investments designed to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. Its flights originating in San Francisco would use a low-emissions substitute for jet-A refined from a mess of pottage that […]

The cover story in The New York Times magazine for September 22, 2019, was entitled, “What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?” The writer, William Langewiesche—son of the sainted author of Stick and Rudder, Wolfgang Langewiesche—is a veteran of Flying, an experienced pilot, and a thorough and technically savvy researcher of his wide-ranging articles […]

Santa Paula Airport is a 20-minute flight from my home base, Whiteman Airport. The fuel there is $1.25 per gallon cheaper, however, so when I’m flying around the local area, I often stop at Santa Paula to refuel. The precise economics of fuel tourism are an SAT-level problem, but if I’m over Santa Paula anyway, […]

Congress created the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1915 “to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight with a view to their practical solution.” What would eventually become the world’s largest and most productive aeronautical-research establishment began as a committee of 12 unpaid men with a budget of $5,000 per […]