The Pilot’s Lounge

Here in the pilots lounge at the virtual airport a few of us are muttering darkly about May’s flying weather. It comes after a winter for wimps, so mild that the lakes never froze hard enough for skiplane operations. It says right here in the contract that we’re supposed to have a cold winter with […]

Spring showed up last week, taking a lot of us by surprise. Everybody at the virtual airport adjusted pretty quickly except old Hack – he knows this first warm spell is just a teaser so he sat around in his heavy coat and muttered at the rest of us. As usual, the good weather brought […]

The pilot lounge in Newark is larger than most but otherwise is the same as all of them. Lazy Boy recliner chairs are scattered about the brick-walled windowless room like the remnants of a close-out furniture sale. Some of them are broken down by hundreds of desperate toss-turned nights spent by harried (and cheap) commuters. […]

I‘ve long promised myself I’d never get in this argument again. I have resisted manfully (is that sexist?) Every time I start to say something on this subject, I cover my ears and start the usual mantra, “Pink elephants, pink elephants…” trying to avoid even thinking about it. It’s a little like the time we […]

The pilot’s lounge relocated a bit to the south, while I spent some time doing volunteer flying in a Cessna 206 for LightHawk, the airborne conservation organization. LightHawk does most of its work in the U.S., but assists in efforts in Central America during the winter. My rotation was in the country of Belize. I’ve […]

A while ago one of my instrument students and I flew nearly six hours in a day. Not surprisingly, his last landing was probably measurable on the Richter scale. Earning our eternal enmity, someone then made a crude, derogatory remark about the landing over the CTAF/Unicom frequency. Neither of us responded, but over the next […]

After flying for a few years, many pilots come to feel that airports, just like airplanes, have personalities. Here in the Pilot’s Lounge at the virtual airport there seems to be a pretty universal opinion that while each airport is a gateway to the world aloft, some are warm, friendly haunts, as comfortable as an […]

It started with a bike ride. I was taking advantage of our unseasonably warm fall and riding through a subdivision near a local lake. As I approached a woman who was out for a walk, I heard an airplane. Being genetically unable to ignore any aircraft in the vicinity, I looked and saw it was […]

I rolled my suitcase over the entry door hump, unhooked my flight bag from its strap and heaved it in one swift motion onto my left-hand seat in the cockpit of a rapidly aging MD-88. My suitcase went into the cockpit coat closet and like a good pilot, I strapped it in using the canvas […]

Hack started it, another, er, discussion, that’s it, discussion, in the pilot’s lounge here at the virtual airport. Hack was explaining to one of the yuppie pilots that no self-respecting human being would ever allow a bartender to serve him a martini with ice floating in it. Hack was explaining real loud. As the exchange […]