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All airplanes should be yellow. Cub yellow, even though I’m not a huge fan of J-3s but admit they’re fetching in Lock Haven livery with tails in the grass. I’ve known some off-color Cub pilots, such as Brian in California, who back in the 1970s flew a green Cub. Flew it well, too, by avoiding […]

I sometimes like to affect a look of wide-eyed, engaged curiosity to hide my usual jaded seen-it-all worldliness so as not to appear too enthusiastic. I could probably work that sentence a little more but I’m sure you get the gist. But even I will admit to some surprise at the rumble last week’s video […]

Yesterday—a nonsensical dateline since I don’t know when you’ll read this—I encountered the unimaginable. Asked to move a friend’s Nissan Altima (car not an airplane), I pressed the brake and turned the key. I didn’t first check the oil, drain a fuel sample, or yell, “Clear!” as I would in most modern airplane starts, and […]

I was doing some research for a coming editorial project on runway separation when I thought to look into the history of runway accidents at Oshkosh during AirVenture. I figured this would be rich pickings because for those few glorious days in July, the Oshkosh tower is the busiest on the planet and they work […]

While my long suffering wife has called me many versions of the same thing, often in colorful language, I would not characterize myself as a wild-eyed romantic. Yet my life, and by extension hers, is littered with the unfinished, sometimes half-baked and, I hasten to add, modestly successful flights of fancy that, to me, make […]

Considering its impact on aviation, we’ve done relatively little coverage of COVID-19, believe it or not. I didn’t have to scroll back in the video backlist very far to find the video interview I did with Jack Pelton in which we were both filleted for allowing as how it might take a vaccine to bring […]

In my (sometimes) fevered imagination, I can conjure tense meetings in a windowless government conference room where well-meaning functionaries and assistant sub-secretaries are arguing about who’s going to do it. “Well, I’m not doing it. You do it.” “I’m not doing it. You have to do it.” “No way. Someone else has to do it.” […]

Once again in an egregious snub, the Nobel prize for literature did not go to an aviation novel, such as Rick Durden’s “The Old Man And The Seaplane,” about an aging CFI’s lone struggle against an enormous walleye on a lake up in Michigan. Not aviation’s first rejection from the Swedish rodeo. Instead, Nobelers went […]

Over the weekend, a highly experienced skydiver acquaintance of mine died in an accident that was, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of last week’s midair collision in Colorado. It was a midair canopy collision that the other skydiver survived. This news reached me on Sunday morning as I was thinking about the Centennial […]

Douglas Adams, the noted author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” was a prolific writer whose creative work encompassed essays, books, screenplays and television. I can’t say I’m a devoted fan, but I think I read Hitchhiker some years ago. After his death in 2001, an unfinished novel called the “Salmon of Doubt” was […]