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South of Venice, we’re blessed to have a nice little grass field called Buchan. Nothing fancy, just a couple of thousand feet of cleared Florida scrub maintained by the county. It’s a dying breed, I guess, but it’s perfect for the Cub so I use it a lot.Our new Cub partner, Jack, lives on the […]

I was just a kid of 10 when a United DC-8 and a TWA Constellation named Star of Sicily collided over Staten Island on December 16th, 1960, raining debris and bodies over a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Park Slope. It would be an accident of many firsts-the first passenger jet crash in the U.S., the […]

There’s nothing better than flying for a living, unless it’s not flying for a living. That seems to be the consensus of the 90-plus commenters who had their say over the last week or so on the U.S. News Web site, which listed “Commercial Pilot” as one of the “50 Best Jobs for 2011.” We’ve […]

If there was anything surprising about the announcement of Teledyne Continental Motors being sold to a Chinese conglomerate this week, I guess it would be that it didn’t happen sooner. It’s not that Continental is an unattractive business prospect, but that it no longer fits with the Teledyne parent. Compared to Lycoming’s Textron parent, Teledyne […]

The date on my AOPA card says I’ve been a member since 1986 and I realized last evening I had neglected to send in my renewal. I’ll be taking care of that today because despite the little spat we’ve been having with the association, I intend to remain a member. And I’ll get to why […]

Looking backward into a century of aircraft development, one truth has remained constant: One man’s visionary is another’s wild-eyed kook when it comes to new product development. I thought of that recently when I visited the Eclipse factory in Albuquerque. The jury is still out on whether Eclipse will be the vision thing or the […]

What with the frenzy over the WikiLeaks’ revelation of State Department secrets igniting a furious debate about government secrets, I have a little story to relate. But first, for context, here’s a relevant quote I came across recently from President John F. Kennedy, speaking before the Newspaper Publisher’s Association in 1961, at a time when […]

As the discussion in Washington turns at least semi-serious about deficit and debt reduction, an interesting story about the Pentagon’s F-35 story emerged this week. The program may have to be cut or curtailed if defense spending takes a hit, which it almost certainly will. This presents defense planners with what may turn out to […]

When I was speaking to Marcie Keever at Friends of the Earth for this podcast last week, she laughed when I informed her that many in the aviation community view FOE as a bunch of tree-hugging, environmental whackos. “I’ve been called a lot worse,” she said, and I wouldn’t argue the point. Groups like FOE, […]

It’s nice that we set aside a day, or at least a few hours, once a year, to think about all the things to be thankful for, because it’s easy enough to forget all that in the noise and rumble of daily life. We spend a lot of time griping, and a lot of time […]