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As I was sitting through the NTSB probable cause hearing on the Kobe Bryant crash last Tuesday—all four hours of it—I felt like I was watching “A Few Good Men” for the 39th time. It’s on every other night on my cable system. I know what’s going to happen, but I still like watching Jack […]

The sheer audacity required to create a business that aims to profit from space flight, including interplanetary travel, guarantees that those who bite are going to have something of an attitude. The three current front runners, SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Virgin Galactic’s Sir Richard Branson, have it in spades and none is […]

Marie Kondo, I’ve got this. Ms. Kondo, you’ll surely know, is the queen of the organized lifestyle, urging us all to tidy up our lives and rid ourselves of things that don’t spark joy. I’ve got so much clutter in my life that I’ve inverted the solution. I’m concentrating on things that do spark joy […]

Of all the passions the human condition can summon, the appreciation of fine art, the attraction to epicurean delights, the enlightening experience of exotic travel, the devotion to beautifully composed music—even golf, for God’s sake—on certain days, none are more enervatingly futile as flying airplanes. But at least doing so is consistently expensive. And here, […]

“Shine out, fair sun … that I may see my shadow as I pass.” Sound advice from Shakespeare’s Duke of Gloucester (Richard III), a CFI who understood the importance of looking outside the cockpit and away from the electronic gewgaws that distract us from flight. Gloucester was an unlikely inspiration as I recently underwent a […]

For more than five days in January of 1925, 20 mushers and 150 sled dogs led a relay across 674 miles of the Iditarod Trail in a desperate race to save the community of Nome, Alaska, whose residents were suffering and dying in a severe diphtheria outbreak. Today, we hear echoes of that legendary Serum […]

Doing a little back-of-the-envelope math here, it looks like I have spent just shy of half of my entire life writing about avgas. And not just avgas, but the unleaded replacement for it that would ultimately banish tetraethyl lead to the same place we sent dioxin, radium paint, asbestos and the Gilbert Atomic Laboratory Kit […]

When I read the news story about the FAA clamping down on unruly passengers, I imagined there would be two reactions. On one side of the political spectrum is the boilerplate complaint about political correctness and censorship and on the other the plaintive cry to obey the rules, followed by the predictable rejoinder that inevitably […]

Last October, when I wrote a commemorative on the anniversary of the Bell X-1’s exceeding Mach 1, I spent many minutes contemplating my office wall. Or more precisely, what’s on my office wall. It’s one of a short list of my possessions that spark Kondo-esque joy: a fabulous pen-and-ink illustration of the Bell X-1 cockpit […]

In the long sputtering arc of my life, I’ve never gotten around to suffering from road rage. Which is kind of surprising, given how much stuff gets up my nose on an average day before breakfast. I just don’t get annoyed at drivers who cut me off, drive at the speed of snail trails or […]