The Pilot’s Lounge

“May you live in interesting times.” The purported Chinese curse is a most suitable understatement for what we inhabitants of this fragile blue marble have been experiencing as the year 2020 grinds on. Here in the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport the regulars have been staying in touch electronically and flying little. COVID-19 has […]

The runway lights were just coming on when I met Kary and Karver in the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport. Kary is a longtime CFI and volunteer pilot with the Civil Air Patrol and I admire her judgment on safety matters. Karver is a young man who recently completed his instrument and commercial ratings […]

It’s been unusually quiet in the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport. We lost Old Hack last week. No, he wasn’t missing. I’m getting the words all wrong. We knew right where he was—in the long-term care facility where he’d been the last year or so—the place that he rudely referred to as the “feebs […]

It was a foggy mid-week morning when I stopped into the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport. I was doing some research for an article in our sister publication Aviation Consumer and I needed Wi-Fi access, so I figured I’d tap into the flight school’s system. Karver, recently instrument rated and Kary, a long-time pilot […]

Now that I could see the airplane, I was pretty sure that It was an Aviat Husky. The down-to-your-shoelaces fog that I’d driven through to the airport was beginning to lose its battle with the sun. When I got out of my car 20 minutes ago, the fog had been the absolute master of the […]

I’d stepped into the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport after finishing up with my last student of the day. I didn’t think anyone was still in the building and I wanted to make sure the coffee maker was off—it has a tendency to create enough smoke to fog the room by morning if left […]

I happened to run into Armando during my last visit to the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport. He’s been around the aviation insurance world for some years, is a CFI and has a common-sense approach to the world. We had some of the lounge’s lousy coffee as we chatted and watched takeoffs and landings […]

A few months ago, I was at the virtual airport watching the aviation world go by through the picture window of the pilot’s lounge when a sharp-looking Grumman Tiger taxied in and shut down. The canopy slid back and two old friends, Jayne and Dan, based at an airport a couple of hundred miles away, […]

It was a very good afternoon in the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport. OK, the weather was well and truly lousy, and no one was flying. But a lot of pilots had somehow decided that it was the kind of afternoon where the right thing to do was sit in the ratty recliners, drink […]

It was my Sunday morning to pick up the doughnuts on the way to the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport, so I wanted to get there early. If it’s your doughnut day and you show up after the regulars are already ensconced in the ratty old recliners, swilling coffee and telling flying lies, you’re […]