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It had been a long day and the last thing I needed when I came back up to my layover motel room after dinner was a long talk with my flight bag. It was still up, though, and had something on its mind.Say what you will about luggage, but when your flight bag of the […]

Presidential Protection Maybe it isn’t newsworthy any more, but we had two single-engine planes forced down by military fighters at our local airport, Crest Air Park (S36) in Kent, Wash., during the presidential visit to the Puget Sound area. I live inside the traffic pattern and heard, saw, and felt the F-15s as they flew […]

Photos by Kirk Webber and Maria Rieger It is midmorning on what is shaping up to be a hot, sunny day at 4 Wing Cold Lake, Alberta. Members of the public are beginning to gather at the end of a runway at Canada’s busiest fighter base, hoping to catch a glimpse of the “tiger.”It is […]

The scene is played out over and over on nice, sunny weekend afternoons across the country. The proud and excited new pilot leads her passenger out to the airplane. As they walk across the ramp, the pilot assures the passenger the weather will be good for the flight. Using all of the weather terms she […]

Prop Strike In his article (Prop Strike!) John Ruley wrote: Up through the mid-1960s, it was common practice not to open the crankcase after a simple blade strike. Instead, a dial-indicator test was performed on the crankshaft end (basically, to see if the shaft was bent). This is now considered inadequate.” Not always. A 310 […]

In the previous article (Part I), I mentioned I had “an electrical failure,” which suggested that I had only had one. Well, electrical failures come in all kinds of permutations, and I’ve had more than my fair share. I read an article about a Navy test pilot who — while test-firing a new missile over […]

If you’ve been reading my columns, you know I’m always going on and on about following the rules and the way things are supposed to work. I try to explain why and how, but I always feel like I’m not getting through to some folks. So this month I thought I’d try something a little […]

Before taking my private pilot students on their first “real” cross-country, I’d usually have them do a sort of rapid-fire tour of the local area airports by drawing a crisscrossing pattern of destinations for the student to plot checkpoints between, calculate winds and fuel burn, and get airport information. It was a great way of […]

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part series on flying the Zero. Read Part One first. Revisiting the very interesting aileron tabs, I have updated information. Thanks again to historian Alan Gaynor, who dug up further details on those strange devices. I got it almost right last month, but some documents he found […]

Commercialism at Oshkosh I note that many people responding to your QOTW think commercialism is “way out of hand at Oshkosh.” I beg to differ. Oshkosh has infinite potential — what it turns out to be for you is exactly what you make it.I camped beside a guy who was flying a Kitfox ultralight and […]