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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 […]

There’s a parable I learned as an ATC cadet at the FAA Academy. It poses a child, furiously digging through a pile of horse manure. When asked why, the kid replies, “There’s gotta be a pony in there somewhere!” And that encapsulates humanity’s collective enthusiasm to seek reward in times redolent of deep poop. Lab […]

Yogi Berra may have complained about making predictions being difficult because they’re in the future, but the poor man never could have envisioned how easy it is after 2020. The only direction is up, right? I wrote that not so much out of hope or conviction, but of sheer, undiluted desperation. Still, ever confident if […]

I have developed a full-up phobia about airplane seatbelts possibly tending toward a tinge of hatred. YouTube is the cause of this, but so are airplane manufacturers. Like the automobile industry before them, airplane designers and builders have generally viewed seatbelts—or at least their design and execution—as an afterthought. There are some exceptions and also […]

Airline traffic over the Thanksgiving holiday was widely lauded as at least a modest success. Despite urgings from public health officials, all four days of the holiday showed substantial traffic growth over the previous weekend, but all things are relative. Thanksgiving Day itself is the heaviest traveled day in the U.S. for all modes, but […]

ATC can be unmercifully dull when no one’s flying. It’s a little like non-combat guard duty in the Army; I pulled a lot of that. The public conjures images of steely eyed sentries at Fort Dix, squinting into the New Jersey mist, M-16s at the ready. Or at least that’s the image I had when […]

Fighter pilots have a phrase—beyond visual range—to describe launching weapons against opponents they can’t see. I think of this every time I see one of Elon Musk’s edge-of-technology rocket tests, even the ones that blow up, as this one did last week at SpaceX’s test site in Texas.  Musk’s vision isn’t just beyond my visual […]

There were four men in the cockpit of the B-29 that day and as a famous writer would later observe, no one knew their names. They soon would. It was July 4, 1947, and the B-29, piloted by Bob Cardenas, was flying west to the high desert from Buffalo, New York, with the Bell XS-1 […]

I guess I’ve misunderstood the term “emotional support” as it applies to animals. As any owner of a border collie will tell you, that’s a street that runs one way in the opposite direction for us. As you may have read in the accompanying news columns, the DOT has ruled against folks who insisted on […]

When I was growing up in the 1950s, those boring, golden years between the unmitigated glory of World War II and the current mass hysteria we call modern life, my father had a veritable library of succinct phrases to suit each child-rearing challenge. At the blink of an eye, he could lapse into Autophrase Select […]