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A few weeks ago I got a call from my old friend Noah, looking for crew for a morning balloon flight. This used to be a common occurrence around here back in the ‘80s, when we had maybe 10 balloons based in Rhode Island, but these days it’s pretty rare. Noah mainly flies his small […]

The idiot who first said, “You never forget your firsts,” would be the first person I’d keel-haul in my armada of firsts gone sour. Yeah, I remember my first love, a 1949 Cessna 195, parked saucily on the ramp at Teterboro Airport (TEB) in the late 1960s. Wouldn’t give me a nod with her nose […]

I have a handful of vivid memories of Christian Dries, founder of Diamond Aircraft, but none are more searing than watching him storm across a windswept ramp in Austria all but foaming at the mouth. He wanted me to commit to my notebook his solemn pledge that the airplane I was looking at would absolutely, […]

Aviation has never lacked for dumb ideas. It’s what drives innovation. “Hey, Orville, wanna jump off a sand dune strapped to these really cool wings I made in the bike shop?” What seemed stupid in 1903 is recognized as pioneering genius today. Likewise, countless other notions such as flying inside clouds without reference to the […]

From 2005 to 2015, my small flight school offered training in the famously rare Comco Ikarus C42, which was (and still is) manufactured in Germany. I say “rare” because (to my knowledge), only 13 C42s were ever imported in the U.S., and at one point I had three of them in my hangar. It was […]

I have my own little axe to grind here and so let the sparks fly. Last month, as part of routine newsgathering duties, I tried to compile a how-goes-it on the FAA’s Piston Aviation Fuels Initiative, or PAFI. This yielded nothing but a waste of time and mounting frustration for me because everyone I spoke […]

When I drive around town, I never fail to see some kind of hybrid car, say a Toyota Prius or maybe a Ford Fusion and the occasional Nissan Leaf. This tells me that hybrids and electric vehicles are now dominating the automotive market and airplanes are soon to follow. And here, let me welcome you […]

Let’s call him Peter. I was his fifth flight instructor since he started learning to fly nine months earlier. He was attempting to obtain his private license within the 365-day period allowed for registered aliens living in the U.S. When we met, my first question was, “How did you go through so many instructors?” Some […]

When I first started on the aviation beat, about a hundred years ago, I remember looking at a report about an airliner that had to turn around and land due to “smoke in the cockpit.” I wondered for a minute or two if that was newsworthy, but a little research quickly schooled me — these […]

It appears to be happening at a glacial pace, but ever so slowly I realize that Cessna’s recent removal of the $465,000 Skyhawk JT-A from its product portfolio underscores the company’s declining relevance in general aviation training, a segment it once owned. What would happen if Cessna decided to exit the piston single market entirely? […]