The FAA has never shown interest in the airspace below the top of the 100-plus-foot tall evergreen trees that surround my home. They’ve never inspected. They’ve never inquired. Nothing. Why? In part because it isn’t “navigable” airspace. That all changed when the FAA recently issued an Interim Final Rule that states “anyone who owns a […]
Opinion
In my opinion…
Recently, while covering the subject of Part 91 regulations with a crowd of general aviation enthusiasts, I posed this question: Let’s say you’re planning on making a day VFR flight from your local airport. You show up and preflight the airplane and everything looks great — except the attitude indicator isn’t working. Can you still make the […]
Global growth phenomenon
Now that 2015 has entered the history books, we will slowly begin to see statistics for the year. My guess is that most aviation media will completely miss one of the big picture perspectives. This oversight does not represent a knowledge failure, but instead reflects a U.S-centric focus on general aviation. In the world of […]
Not all doom and gloom
Doom and gloom too often find the spotlight. While some view the world through Eeyore’s sad eyes, many are too busy enjoying what life — and flying — have to offer. A FRESHMAN’S FIRST SEMESTER Swayne Martin is a freshman at the University of North Dakota (UND). He also happens to co-lease a 1968 Cessna 172I with […]
Are pilots lone wolves or domesticated dogs?
I recently read about a study involving dogs in homes, dogs in shelters, and wolves. The researchers rounded up 10 animals from each category and gave them each a puzzle box containing a food reward. The catch was that the box could only be opened with some persistence. Eight of the 10 wolves successfully opened […]
Change is in the air
Human beings are, by nature, a somewhat dull and pedestrian crowd. They tend to like the status quo and abhor change. If you know any human beings, you’ve no doubt noticed this characteristic of their personalities. Perhaps nothing illustrates this resistance to change the way the global cooling/global warming/climate change argument has. Had the earth’s […]
Flying Icon’s A5 LSA seaplane
The Light-Sport Aircraft (LSA) sector is aviation’s newest and most prolific with numerous outstanding aircraft available from Europe and the United States. Europeans seemed to own the category at first because regulations on the other side of the Atlantic permitted companies to fully build very similar aircraft. When the FAA caught up by releasing the […]
Logbooks catalog more than hours
By JEB BURNSIDE. I’m in the middle of what’s shaping up to be a long-term project: Organizing my logbooks and other flight records. I have varying details on literally decades of personal flying spread across four bound logbooks, a roll-my-own database on a hard drive, and my airplane’s tach sheets. Very little is duplicated in […]
Aeronca C-2: Small plane, big records
Introduced in February 1930 at the St. Louis Air Show, the Aeronca C-2 was the first lightweight aircraft to be type certificated for production. Coming as it did during a time of economic distress that affected everyone in aviation, the low-cost, low-upkeep Aeronca C-2 put flying within the reach of many. It was available for […]