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What of Vickers? Our Elaine Kauh suffered the ultimate indignity for a journalist on Sunday: no free lunch. As I mentioned in Monday’s blog, Vickers Aircraft was supposed to sponsor a media lunch on Sunday to talk about their new Wave amphibian. Except, they weren’t. Company owner Paul Vickers dropped me an email on Monday.”We […]

I try not to get my pants snagged writing over-romanticized paeans to the intoxicating magic of flight. For as soon as I allow self-restraint to slip for even a moment, the editorial equivalent of a piston through the crankcase will surely reveal itself. Thus, when AirVenture looms on the horizon every year, we gingerly gird […]

If you didn’t take time to click on and watch this week’s video on a Navy E2C carrier mishap earlier this year, I recommend it. Put yourself in the pilot’s seat of the Hawkeye and you’ll appreciate the remarkable outcome. As the story explains, the Hawkeye was involved in carrier workups off the North Carolina […]

The other day, I was driving down a Florida road and had to slow for a power company crew repairing a live line—a big one, one of those kilovolt distribution jobs. It was raining lightly and there was lightning in the distance. “No way in hell I’d ever do that job,” I thought to myself. […]

Third class medical reform finally staggers across the finish line and now what? I find myself in a binary state of mind. On the bright side, I’m enthusiastic and grateful for the work that went into getting this legislation passed—by Senator Jim Inhofe and co-sponsors and by the advocacy groups. They deserve recognition for the […]

Now that the summer ditching season is in full swing, it’s time for my periodic public service announcement to remind you about beach landings. The last couple of weeks saw a bumper crop of unplanned water landings, three off beaches and one on a beach near Galveston, Texas.As I’ve said before, I’ve taken it on […]

Somewhere in the considerable reading I’ve done on the Apollo program, a comment from William Anders stuck with me. Anders was the lunar module pilot on the historic Apollo 8 mission in 1968. It marked the first time a manned spacecraft had departed earth orbit to journey to another body in the solar system. Anders […]

That we live in interesting times is made ever more evident by an email I got from reader Matthew Sawhill following last week’s fatal crash of a Tesla Model S being operated on the car’s much-touted autopilot feature. Conceding that cars aren’t airplanes, Sawhill asked: “Why can’t the auto industry and mass media learn from […]

As the U.K.’s vote to exit the European Union settles in, we sought out a general aviation perspective from across the Atlantic from Thomas Borchert, editor of the German-language fliegermagazin and from Ian Seager, publisher of the U.K. Flyer magazine. From Germany The overwhelmingly major benefit of the EU for GA pilots has been a […]

If you’re a reader of current events—and these days, who isn’t?—you can’t have missed Friday morning’s seismic news about the U.K.’s vote to exit the European Union. It’s easy to compartmentalize that as being “over there” with little or no impact on the U.S. Pardon me, but I don’t think so, although no one knows […]