AVweb Classics

It was Saturday afternoon at the local flight school and, as I tried to snooze in a lounge chair near the back of the room, I overheared a CFI begin his student’s Aviation as a Foreign Language training:”No,” he said, “it is pronounced ‘eh-luh-ron’ not ‘air-loin.’ “His student tried to repeat after him but still […]

Who knew that a nice afternoon movie during a Fort Lauderdale layover would lead me to pontificate yet again about aviation?The whole crew and I decided to take in an early after-lunch movie at the local cineplex. Since we had to take a vote on which movie to watch and since us two male pilots […]

A good copilot is a good copilot, no matter what the aircraft. I fancied myself a good copilot back when I was a first officer on various airliners. I considered myself better than the average bear when it came to flight engineering, as well. Being a good copilot is harder, in my estimation, than being […]

Pick-up times can come awful early when you are laying over in Manhattan and departing out of Newark. Our 6 a.m. departure for Los Angeles from EWR necessitated a 3:45 a.m. pick-up at the “Mildew Plaza” on 7th Avenue. Our normal pick-up times in Manhattan are an hour and a half before report time, but […]

A folded newspaper fell into my lap as I was sitting in the “king seat” awaiting pushback in Newark. It was a USA Today with the headline, “Two Biggest Airlines Set to Merge,” appearing above the fold. My co-pilot, Chet, had dropped it onto my dormant daddy parts and then flopped into his own lambs-wool […]

It was a tough approach to a landing and I was all by myself. No co-pilot to help me and no company dispatcher to ask for numbers or advice. I was fairly low on fuel — about two and a half gallons left — and the air pressure in my left main gear tire was […]

Cruising in the sun after a long ground delay, three bouts with de-icing and a half-mile-viz takeoff on a snowy runway can really help a pilot relax. The sun was shining in the big, 767 cockpit window on my left and was slowly roasting my arm. I still had my zone heat up high and […]

Dubya had done us a favor this holiday season and officially made all of the Military Operations Areas “cold” during Thanksgiving weekend. What a guy; the MOAs are normally shutdown during holidays anyway, but a political point is a political point.Because of resting military flight crews and a generous (albeit disingenuous) president, we actually arrived […]

It was a nice, sunny day at home. A day off with great weather can be a rarity where I live and I intended to enjoy it to the full. My neighbor and fellow pilot, Chad, and I had one appointment to attend to before we headed out to play tennis. Apparently, there is such […]

My nephew Kermit had moved up in the world. Fresh out of the Aviation College at the University of South Toledo, he was a sales-rep gofer for one of the dozens of new VLJ manufacturers that dot the flying landscape of late.He was justifiably proud of the “Sky-Screamer 100.” Not only did this three-place, subsonic, […]