Enjoy pilot stories? Our Pilot Talk section is full of informative and entertaining flying tales from accomplished pilot authors.
Sahara When I departed St. John’s, Newfoundland, for Santa Maria, Azores, yesterday, the always-angry North Atlantic raged beneath me, waves rolling 20 feet at the crests with winds of 30 knots blowing whitecaps off the tops, according to the Hibernia oil platform 200 miles out. After a while, I tried not to look at the more »
I lived in Alaska in the mid-’90s but kept my airplane on the northwestern side of Tucson at the Avra Valley Airport. Known as a fun sport aviation airport, it was the epicenter of the local aerobatic scene, with an aerobatic box right next to the airport. Home of IAC Chapter 62, Avra Valley was more »
Cessna 172 Skyhawk 1 Fatal Jay, Oklahoma The private pilot was conducting a personal cross-country flight. Fuel records indicated that the pilot had purchased 9.56 gallons of fuel the day before the accident. A witness reported observing the pilot use fuel cans to add fuel to both airplane’s fuel tanks. The witness saw the pilot more »
I remember the early days, staring at a paper Twin Cities sectional, dreaming about places I still might go. Leave Fargo, I thought. Leave the Jet Center and head vaguely southeast. I didn’t know how to cross the Canadian border to the north, and I had friends in Alexandria, Minneapolis and Chicago, so I put more »
“Oh, sorry, that hasn’t worked for a while,” the pilot said when he noticed I was trying to tune the DME in his aircraft while flying a couple of instrument approaches for his currency. “What do you do when you fly an approach that requires DME?” I asked him, hoping the answer was that he more »
Sometime next month, I’ll write an entry in my logbook signifying that I’ve spent 15,000 hours flying airplanes. This strikes me as a momentous, but arbitrary number. Most people don’t keep a detailed log of their work hours, nor do they break those hours down into neat categories. Within my 15,000, I’ve spent just shy more »
My logbook entry on May 29, 1984, says Cessna 185, N93033, Dillingham to Bethel, 1.5 hours, “Lost.” The writing is small, sheepish, hard to admit. I was excited about my first big solo trip in the 185. The 185 was the first small airplane I had flown, and I had since been working on my more »
On June 25, 2015, about 24 miles east-northeast of Ketchikan, Alaska, eight passengers and the pilot of a float-equipped single-engine turboprop de Havilland DHC-3 Otter were killed in yet another controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accident. The pilot was under pressure from a closing time window in which to get the passengers back to Ketchikan more »
It was June 1991, and I’d been hired to fly right seat in the one and only Swearingen SJ-30 flight test article from San Antonio to Le Bourget Airport, Paris, for the Paris Air Show. My captain was Carl Pascarell, a former Navy attack pilot who had flown A-7 Corsairs off aircraft carriers during the more »
Most commonly used aviation gasoline for piston engines: 100LL Dye used in 100LL: 1,4-dialkylaminoanthraquinone (also called C.I. Solvent Blue 98) Dye color: Blue Average cost of 100LL in the U.S., April 2017: $4.75/gal. Average cost of avgas in the U.S., 1980: $1.95 Density of avgas (all grades) at 15° C: 6.01 lbs./U.S. gal. Density of avgas (all grades) at -40° C: 6.41 more »
Piper PA-32R Saratoga 2 Nonfatal Fort Mohave, Arizona The pilot reported that, during the initial climb, he retracted the landing gear normally and then “a few minutes later the radios went blank.” He believed he had a radio problem, so he decided to return to the airport. During the return, the pilot moved the landing more »
Most aviators want to be the best they can be. We all want to be Maverick in Top Gun, ruling the skies and greasing on every landing. Whether we fly a 747 or a Piper Cherokee, when we get in that airplane and flip on the switches, we are pilot-in-command. The world awaits. But once more »
Don’t feel bad when it happens to you, even spaceships bounce off the earth’s atmosphere if their reentry isn’t perfectly choreographed. What matters is that you have a game plan ready, to instantly execute, in the event a botched landing leaves you airborne, and a bit surprised at the top of a bounce. In fact, more »
I never liked the saying, “Plan the flight and fly the plan.” Most GA flying requires bending the plan to fit the reality of the moment—or ends with the breaking of something valuable. When the aircraft capabilities are limited and crew resource management consists of talking to oneself, flexibility is king. Flexibility flows from a more »
“If you’re going to take out the windshield of your car and replace it with a screen, what would it take for you to drive as fast?” Alex Sauriol, Chief Technology Officer at Searidge Technologies, is explaining the challenge of building remote, electronic air traffic control towers. If we are to change the system of more »
I was only a few hours into my flight training before I began fantasizing about owning my own airplane. While the ink was still wet on my temporary private pilot certificate, I developed a five-year plan for aircraft ownership. I should have known that nothing would go according to plan. I had intended to purchase more »
Breakfast, it would seem, is the preferred way to celebrate the Fourth of July in these parts. The firemen put on an annual pancake feast in town, as do the folks who run the local airfield. We call them airfields because, in the beginning, that’s exactly what they were. Not runways, but weedy fields about more »
It was one of those nights the high plains of New Mexico are famous for. The moon was waxing toward full, and there were thousands of stars vying for my attention as I climbed my Mooney’s wingwalk for the flight home to California. If it hadn’t been such a long day, I might have better more »