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I occasionally delight and shock my non-aviation friends with short, expletive-laden descriptions of airplane engines having changed little since VE day. In some ways, they’ve gotten a little worse. “Wait, you mean they have pushrods and carburetors? How can that be true?” It is true, of course, unless you fly one of the new-tech diesels […]

Last week, I was asked what I thought of the idea of a small airshow event going forward at the end of the July, about in the same time frame when AirVenture would have occurred. It’s to be a small outdoor-only event. The organizer asked me if I thought it would draw? Was it a […]

As a writer, I receive a slug of calls, often telling me I’m full of beans. I usually agree and ask how the caller got my number. Most calls are friendly, and 30-ish years ago I received one from Rudy Frasca, the very real simulator guy. I didn’t know Rudy, but he’d just read my […]

Are you familiar with the term gaslighting? It’s from the cultural vernacular and it means that some tormenter or malign force is causing you to doubt your own sanity. In my case, the bad actor seems to be reality itself, in this case some recent press coverage suggesting that we really have to have a […]

A pilot friend who knows more than I do about everything once said, “All air traffic controllers should first be pilots.” He was buying the beer, so I agreed. At the time I was both a pilot and a controller. Today, I still fly but haven’t said “Cleared to land” with any authority in years. […]

For reasons entirely selfish, I was happy to hear EAA cancel AirVenture 2020. Now I don’t have to continue struggling with the decision to get there, how to navigate the place with minimal risk or whether to go at all. For more altruistic reasons, I’m sorry it has come to this. AirVenture is the world’s […]

A couple of weeks ago we ran two stories that illustrate—well something—about the ways in which recreational aviation is being affected by COVID-19 in different countries. One story talked about the virtual lockdown of non-essential flying in the U.K., enabled largely by obliging weekend warriors, who complied with their government’s polite request to please hang […]

Some things are encoded into the DNA of all humans. Say, for example, a universal desire for glazed donuts or the natural tendency to run from a charging rhino. Things like an appreciation of the double-wide modular as classic architecture or Coors being a real beer and, especially, privacy, vary from culture to culture. Asian […]

By personal predilection, I’m not wired to butt into other peoples’ business. Personal agency is a thing with me. But there are times when intervention goes with the job and one of those is when giving flight instruction. The pilot approaches you for a flight review and upon being handed his logbook, you see prominently […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has struck no industry harder than aviation and the airlines. In the U.S., domestic load factors and flights are a fraction of their levels just a month ago. International travel has been similarly devastated, stranding many travelers for weeks, if not longer. Today’s blog details the experience of contributor J. Scott Dyer […]