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The beauty of unfettered capitalism, especially American capitalism, is that it’s usually good at what it’s supposed to do: efficiently replicating capital in a consumption-driven economic system designed for infinite growth. Nice theory, but before you know it, the Chinese own half of your aviation industry even if investors have soured on what was once […]

As a kid relegated to the wayback in a 56 Plymouth wagon, I’d hang over the tailgate to watch the New Jersey Turnpike unroll beneath my imagination.  Inside my brain, permanently fogged with tetraethyly leaded exhaust fumes, the highway was a runway, and I was a B-17 tail gunner experiencing flight in reverse. Alone, I’d […]

America, America may God thy gold refine‘Til all success be noblenessAnd every gain divined –Katherine Lee Bates All flying machines have their own unique sound signatures. If you were blindfolded, you probably couldn’t tell the difference between a 737 and an A320. But unique in the world of aviation is the sound of a Bell […]

In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines. –George Dyson, historian The other night I was watching an amusing program called James May: Our Man […]

I once made a landing that was so bad the Earth winced. At least that’s what I inferred from the tower when the controller drawled, “Cessna 72A, if able, taxi to parking.” ATC sarcasm is a thin gruel best served cold, but I admit it must’ve turned heads the way the nosewheel shimmied as I […]

Sometime around 1996, the aviation industry flipped a group-think switch and decided what the world really needed was some very light jets. A whole lot of very light jets. Fast forward and the story leads right through the development last week that the assets of one those companies—Eclipse Aerospace—may sell for the paltry sum of […]

My friend, Paul Bertorelli, recently produced the best line in aviation literature, even better than Lindbergh’s description of the North Atlantic on his historic 1927 solo flight: “Holy cow, that’s a lot of water! What was I thinking?!” Tough to top, but Paul encapsulated the thoughts of every pilot of a certain age when he […]

If you could put a single date on the airline disaster that is the COVID-19 pandemic, it would be March 23, 2020. On that single day, after a week of brisk declines, passenger traffic through TSA security went off a cliff. The week before, at 1.25 million passengers per day, it had already been about […]

As I’ve observed, the news business has always been little like standing on the side of a river watching the water go by. But what with a gazillion content sources, it’s more like a 500-year flood now. There’s so much bandwidth to fill and so many sensors feeding the maw, everything is a story. And […]

Sometime in 1978, I was thumbing through an issue of Esquire magazine and it fell open to an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff.” The book would appear the following year. Esquire picked Wolfe’s breathless recounting of Chuck Yeager’s historic Mach 1 flight in the X-1. Today, October 14, is the 73rd anniversary of […]