Flight Safety

This is the second in a series of excerpts that began with Chapter One. Chapter 2: Notes on Lesson One — Effects of Controls This will be a short chapter because, unfortunately, I did not make full notes on the lesson. No doubt I was excited and over-exuberant, and possibly incoherent, after this flight. I […]

You know it’s bad when you walk into the control room and hear a controller yell, “I want a tracker!” It really wasn’t what he said so much as how he said it. The high side was trying to work all the East Coast traffic around Tropical Storm Gaston and it was getting ugly. A […]

The shadows were lengthening outside the window of the Pilot’s Lounge here at the virtual airport. From the tattered old lounge chair, I could see that the activity on the ramp was spooling down into “tucking them away for the night” mode. The flight school trainers were being fueled by the line crew and moved […]

Introduction A friend suggested to me that if I compiled the notes I made while learning to fly an airplane and throw in a few drawings to distract the more discerning readers, I could make a fortune. This friend was often given to flights of fancy, being a pilot, and I would have dismissed the […]

The ALPA meeting was over and we were in the coffee shop with a bunch of the retirees that had come to see if they still had a retirement. With all the recent turmoil in the business, many airlines had tried to do away with retirement benefits and some had succeeded. Lucky for us they […]

If you’ve already read the first chapter in the book, “The Cessna, The Sky … and the Cartoonist,” then see what the reviewers say about it! “The best read I’ve had in many years; the spelling is almost up to the 50% mark and the punctuation is highly imaginative.” — W. Shakespeare “I had thought […]

A couple of recent events have compelled me to write this article. It’s going to be a little different than my standard fare. You may need to shift into a different gear, so be forewarned.As most of you are aware, I’m getting to be a short-timer. I’ve got just a little over two years left […]

A lot of folks have been saying that the training system is broken. It is and it has been for several years. The advent of technically advanced aircraft has just made that breakdown more apparent. Now, with the coming of the very light jets (VLJ) there is much hand-wringing about “amateurs” in the flight levels. […]

Old Hack, our resident curmudgeon, caught me in the Pilot’s Lounge, here at the virtual airport, the other morning. He plopped down in one of the big, old, worn recliners, scowled at me and said, “Hey, I’m the one who’s supposed to look pissed off at the world. If you look more angry at things […]

Mo had brought me my second beer and I was well on my way to losing my first ten bucks to the video blackjack machine imbedded in the bar when Janet and Keith showed up to share my Las Vegas layover with me.Probably in accord with the public’s preconceived notions of gender roles, Janet was […]