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If you’re traveling by air today—your own airplane or via airlines—you’re having a much better experience than would have been likely if the government hadn’t been reopened on Friday. With the paychecks again flowing, a massive flu outbreak among air traffic controllers has been miraculously avoided. In the annals of disease prevention, it may stand […]

In between your news reporting of the U.S. government shutdown and what adverts might be played during the Super Bowl, you might have heard talk mentioned of the U.K.’s Brexit negotiations. I hesitate to use the word negotiations, as that would indicate all the parties involved are working together to bring together divergent positions into […]

A friend used to delight in telling a joke about the Georgia State Patrol officer who pulls over a couple of rednecks in a pickup, taps his nightstick on the driver’s window then reaches in and pummels the guy for two minutes. “Why’d you do that?” complains the driver. The officer explains one should never […]

The flight was delayed but not enough to cause us any difficulty so my son and I were pretty receptive to the pleasant surprise that lay at the end of the bridge at the new gate. We and about 150 slightly inconvenienced fellow passengers were put on an A330 instead of the A320 we were […]

Not a big fan of Best-Of lists. They rank number eight on my Top 10 Least Favorite Things list, right below raindrops on roses. Recently, AOPA published survey results of a Top 15 list of “classic” airplanes. The Waco F-series caught my eye. These are the stoutly gorgeous open-cockpit biplanes from the 1930s and 40s, […]

For the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8 last month, the PBS NOVA series did a nice documentary on the flight that’s worth finding and watching. Among many, the producers interviewed one of the most cerebral of the astronauts, Michael Collins. He was the command module pilot on Apollo 11 and also a Capcom on Apollo […]

Herbert D. “Herb” Kelleher, the maverick and much beloved co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Southwest Airlines, passed away on Thursday, Jan. 3. He was 87. Herb was a young lawyer recently relocated from the East Coast to Texas when a client, Rollin King, approached him about helping him start a low-fare intra-Texas airline. The eventual […]

The looming pilot shortage has been discussed ad nauseum. It’s here. Some airlines have cancelled flights for lack of qualified pilots. Airlines are offering programs to enable young people to go from zero hours to the right seat. Many solutions have been proposed including salary increases, lowering the number of hours required and so on, […]

On the slushy morning of Dec. 16, 1960, six residents of the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, suffered the irreversible consequences of turbines overtaking the propeller age, when one of the first jetliners, a United DC-8, collided with a piston TWA Super Connie over Staten Island, eight miles away. In total, 134 lives […]

When, in 1927, it was decided to erect a monument to commemorate the first controlled powered flight of an airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the place was considered so remote that Congress figured no one would ever deliberately visit such a fly- and mosquito-infested sand spit. So isolated was Kitty Hawk, that the planners […]