FLYING Magazine

I had flown west through Merrill Pass on my way from Anchorage, Alaska, to the Stony River country and needed to set up a tent camp on one of the small gravel bars along the Swift River, a tributary of the larger Stony. The camp would be used during an upcoming trophy moose hunt for […]

Cost is definitely a factor when taking flight lessons. But have you ever given any thought to the value of really good flight training that will help keep you from becoming a statistic? My main goal in writing this article is to further aviation safety by addressing the poor standards I used in selecting a […]

__The 2004 fourth of July fell on a Sunday, so I had the added benefit of a Monday off from work. My wife and I had planned our trip to Toledo, Ohio, a couple of weeks earlier to catch up with some old friends. This was a perfect-length trip for a single-engine airplane and one […]

(June 2011) For an 80-something-hour pilot, the Sacramento Valley was like a giant flying playpen for me. The foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains border the eastern side while the Coastal Range separates the valley from the Pacific Ocean on the west. The Cascades, including 14,000-foot Mount Shasta, form the northern boundary of the valley. […]

__My wife’s sister invited my wife and I to spend Memorial Day weekend with her and her husband in Cape May, New Jersey. An early summer visit to the Jersey shore sounded like fun, plus I could fly us there in our Cessna Skyhawk. Our plan was to fly out on Saturday, spend a couple […]

(April 2011) IT WAS NOT A BIG MISTAKE. I ended up with damage only to my pride and my reputation. But, I took a shortcut, and I learned about flying from that. I grew up on World War I flying books left in my bedroom bookcase by previous generations. I listened to Dad tell of […]

(March 2011) — THERE WERE TWO HUDSON River accidents in 2009. In January, Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and copilot Jeff Skiles did an excellent job of ditching US Airways Flight 1549. There was also a tragic event in August, when a sightseeing helicopter and a Piper Lance collided and nine people perished. For me, these […]

(February 2011) — The call I was looking for came through in mid-May, offering me a gig as a stage manager at a big summer stock theater in Dayton, Ohio. This would get me out of the summer heat in Miami and would be a step up from the theater at which I was working. […]

(January 2011) — It was my good friend Paul’s second airplane ride. The airplane was a bright red Grumman AA-1 Yankee, my favorite of all the ones owned by the Orlando Aero Club at the time. Quick and responsive, it was my kind of airplane. On this particular flight, we were flying out of Page […]

A look at the NTSB’s report on the February 2009 crash in Buffalo, New York.