The Pilot’s Lounge

A while back I was sitting in the Pilot’s Lounge at the virtual airport wondering what the phrase “sit back and relax” means and why in the world the airlines keep saying it to me when I’m jammed into a seat designed for an eight-year-old. My reverie was disturbed when Tom, a thirty-something businessman, walked […]

On the first warm day in weeks I had gone out to the virtual airport to see if I could get an airplane started that had been tied down outside for over a month. I suspected that the siege of cold weather would have left the battery with a questionable level of oomph. (Don’t you […]

It builds up, doesn’t it? You make some airline flights and get treated like Grade Z beef cattle on the good ones. Then you have one where the experience is so rotten that you vow to use general aviation forevermore. And then the price of avgas goes up. Again. The TSA imposes yet another moronic […]

COLUMN INDEX The Pilot’s Lounge #109: Please, FAA, Return to Reality on Flying In Ice Just when you thought it was OK to fly during the winter, the FAA appears to have changed the definition of known icing. AVweb’s Rick Durden doesn’t like choosing between scud running and getting grounded by FAA inspectors pulling his […]

After taking most of December and a good part of January off, winter has arrived at the virtual airport. I’m alone in the Pilot’s Lounge because freezing rain is falling outside and those who were here realized flying was done for the day and went home. Naturally, because I’ve come back out here to do […]

As the holiday season arrives, the Pilot’s Lounge at the virtual airport acquires what would only charitably be described as an eclectic array of decorations. Untold years ago, the owner of the FBO and flight school started the practice of suspending a small, creatively decorated Christmas tree, inverted, from the ceiling. The original reason has […]

I was sitting in a recliner in the Pilot’s Lounge at the virtual airport, minding my own business, when Old Hack came whistling into the room and pulled the Reader’s Disgust magazine from in front of my slowly-moving lips.”Hey, I was reading that.”Boy, I got more important stuff for you to read, right here. I’ll […]

In September I briefly escaped the grasp of the big, tattered, old recliners in the Pilot’s Lounge at the virtual airport and made my way west to the annual fly-in and convention of LightHawk. It is a public-benefit flying organization dedicated to making flights in support of conservation and the environment — the environmental air […]

During this year’s repositioning of the Pilot’s Lounge from the virtual airport to the EAA convention at Oshkosh, many of our regulars and visitors again partook of a rather cynical variation of the traditional form of recreation-at-the-airport-when-we’re-not-flying: watching arriving aircraft to see stupid pilot tricks.Sadly, we saw a bunch.While the majority of arriving pilots demonstrated […]

Over the past two weeks the topic of discussion in the Pilot’s Lounge at the virtual airport has been preserving and restoring our aviation treasures. It evolved from conversation regarding the staggering sums spent to restore individual airplanes with historic significance, into the surprising lack of interest in the airports, buildings and structures that figured […]