By DEREK ROBERTS. Naval aviator, crop duster, aerobatic competitor and airshow pilot Wayne Handley knows his way around an aircraft or two. A traditional start flying an Aeronca Champ in 1957 led to a stint piloting F4D Skyrays in the Navy and ultimately a successful career as a business owner and crop-dusting pilot. It wasn’t […]
Opinion
Opportunity is knocking…hard
It’s a well-worn bromide of our society: “Children are our future.” Yet, in real life we tend not to conduct ourselves as if we believe that to be true. Another more specifically instructive aphorism suggests, “When opportunity knocks…open the door.” Let’s consider that second quote for a moment. Two weeks from this moment, opportunity will […]
Tell Congress, then tell a friend
A little more than 44% of all airline flight delays between May 2016 and April 2017 were categorized as Air Carrier Delay. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics defines Air Carrier Delay as “within the airline’s control (e.g. maintenance or crew problems, aircraft cleaning, baggage loaded, fueling, etc.).” So it feels a tad misleading when Southwest […]
R.E.S.P.O.N.S.I.B.I.L.I.T.Y.
Not long ago, I did something stupid in an airplane. Gulp. The scenario looked like this: I departed a non-towered airport that lies under Class B airspace. As my flight home was a short one, I didn’t use Flight Following, as I normally would. Instead I simply took off, climbed to 2,000 feet, and settled in […]
Jenny a century later
The World War I Curtiss Jenny trainer evolved from less-than-optimal JN-1 and JN-2 models of 1915 to the definitive JN-4D that found its stride 100 years ago. In the spirit of centennial commemorations, a look back at the Jenny is in order. The earliest Jennies employed control wheels. By the advent of the JN-4D, a more traditional […]
Flying the SeaMax
In summary, I’d call SeaMax a “performance LSA seaplane,” peppy and demanding a bit more pilot attention, but it gets up and goes.
Control is an illusion, except when it’s not
I find it fascinating to watch people attempt to control what is often beyond control. If only a non-profit, non-government entity was in control of air traffic, the ills of airline travel would magically disappear. Or so Congress — and the airlines – would like us to believe. As if… According to the Bureau of Transportation […]
The other call of the wild
When I’m in my own home town, which is a good portion of the time, I walk a lot. It’s an old habit, one I adopted as a public school student. My assigned school bus stop was two miles from my parent’s house. The bus stop was on a hard road, but our home sat […]
Unstable approaches
Three and a half years into writing this column, I finally found where all the general aviation reports to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System have been hiding. Usually, when I query the ASRS database, I get at least six reports from airline pilots for every one report submitted by a GA pilot. Not true for the […]