“Oh, I could never build an airplane,” they say. And you know who they are. Almost anyone who ever overheard a homebuilder or an owner engaged in a restoration project could easily qualify. They rule out their participation before they even consider what the actual skills and requirements might be. They assume failure, then reinforce […]
Politics for Pilots
Rusty Pilots Radio
It was one of those perfect Florida winter evenings. This is the weather flying dreams are made of. The air was smooth. The Cessna 152 and I didn’t experience a single bump. The sun was low off my left wing, a flaming ball of orange hanging just above the horizon. The landscape to my right […]
Something’s happening
Over the course of my life I’ve had three major obsessions. In chronological order they are motorcycles, guitars, and airplanes. My dad was an avid motorcyclist, owning a Harley Davidson 125cc machine when he was but a young lad in St. Petersburg, Florida, in the late 1940s. By the time I was born, he owned […]
In appreciation of the 1%
Current estimates of the population of the United States clock in somewhere around 323 million men, women, and children. If we assume a quarter of those people are under the age of 18, as the US Census Bureau suggests, that cuts the number of adults down to fewer than 250 million men and women. Now, […]
A century’s passion lost and found
Because I’m a bit weird, I found myself reading through a stack of newspapers from the early 20th Century recently. In those pages I found something that I hadn’t seen in a while, something almost foreign to the American public in our current time. It was this: Absolute wonder and unrestrained excitement at the idea […]
Dream differently
If you’re a pilot, you’ve got goals. That’s just the way it is. Maybe it’s the fact that we have goals that lead us to this life where we have it so good. Just ask anyone you meet wandering around the mall. Everyone knows pilots are rich elitists with wads of cash stuffed into the […]
All I want for Christmas, revisited
Since childhood I’ve experienced an onslaught of marketing messages that focus on a single, classic, opening to a sentence. “All I want for Christmas…” I suspect you’ve experienced something similar. At this slightly later stage of life (I tend to doubt any adolescents are reading this page) it might be time to revisit that idea. […]
The importance of a good couch
In the back of my hangar sits the skeleton of a 1949 Piper PA-16 Clipper. It hasn’t flown in many years. That’s kind of sad. Hopefully, somebody will take on the task of restoring it to its former glory one day and it will become airborne again. I can only hope. In front of the […]
Short, sweet, and oh so memorable
My wife and I were empty-nesters for a minute there. Our son is a great success, living in New York City with his own growing family. Our daughters had moved out and were sharing a house together. Then one daughter moved home. A few months later the other followed suit. We are empty-nesters no more. […]