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Presidential TFRs Enough is enough. For the fourth time in the last five months, I have been personally affected by the Presidential TFRs. When are the NSA and Homeland Security going to realize that my Cessna 177 offers very little risk to the president? I have flown to New Smyrna Beach, Fla., for the Daytona […]

Few times in my life have I ever been as nervous and anxious as I was last week. Starting college, my first solo, my first airshow performance, and my first trip without my parents at the age of 13 — these events never presented as much excitement as I experienced last week.For the past five […]

I was sitting in the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport, quietly minding my own business and practicing new hand gestures in case I had to go to Brazil, when Mark — one of the local pilots –caromed off the door frame and boomed into the lounge trailed by scraps of yellow paper emitted from […]

Over the past three and a half decades, I’ve had the opportunity (and frequently the privilege) of working with a great many aircraft mechanics. At first it was as a nave customer having them perform inspections and repairs on my airplane. Later it was as a student and apprentice swinging wrenches under their supervision as […]

DC-9 Hard Landing The aircraft in the video was Ship 909 (NewsWire, Feb. 9). I worked at Douglas Aircraft back then and remember watching this video right after the event. Ship 909 was repaired but never sold to a customer. 909 ended up being used for a number of flight test purposes, one of which […]

I was in a tent and it was raining, but at least it was warm. Standing behind a plywood podium in a “forum tent” at a recent Florida Fly-In, I had been invited to give a little talk to the experimental airplane crowd on what airline flying was really like.I was more than a little […]

Who Are the Terrorists? While it is very unlikely that a Jewish immigrant from Israel would be a member of al Qaeda (NewsWire, Feb. 2), it is not impossible for such a person to be a terrorist.Lest we all forget, prior to 9/11 the single most deadly act of terrorism in the continental U.S. was […]

There’s a variety of obvious reasons why making the jump from piston-twin to regional jet is an exciting transition, but the potential to toss the heavy headgear in favor of a lightweight, non-head-crimping, non-tear-your-ear-off-your-head-when-you-remove-it headset is among the most anticipated. After a few thousand hours, I was looking forward to a peaceful, quiet cockpit, and […]

The whole point of getting an IFR ticket is (of course) to be able to go somewhere when the weather is less than VFR. So why don’t we do that? Let’s take a trip.Let’s say you want to fly from HKY (Hickory, N.C.), pick up your buddy at MRN (Morganton, N.C.), and then head for […]

Let’s take a few pot shots at some of the more common errors in the seemingly simple procedures of starting an engine and doing the runup, and also cover some new techniques with engine monitors. I’ve written a little about some of these procedures elsewhere, but I’ve never pulled all of them together. For Starters […]