For writers, any kind of writers, the big league means writing books. My first foray came 20 years ago when Tab Books – eventually absorbed into the McGraw Hill network – gave me a chance to write about something I held near and dear to my heart, and still do … learning to fly. Called [...]

A recent New York Times’s article, “Drones Are Weapons of Choice in Fighting Qaeda, ” added to the mounting evidence that Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are changing the face of military aviation. This is especially true in the U.S. Air Force, an organization run by pilots for pilots. Herein lies the problem: with a growing number [...]

Measuring the health of U.S. flight schools is easy. Grab the latest General Aviation Manufacturers Association Statistical Databook and see how many student pilot certificates the FAA issued last year. The most recent number is for for 2007: 66,793. If you think that’s dismal, look at 2005: 53,576, the all-time low since the first number [...]

In the spirit of my last post, Share Thumbs-Up Moments With Everyone, I just discovered a new air taxi company, ImagineAir, founded by two flight instructors who met at Georgia Tech. Based in Lawrenceville, just outside of Atlanta, ImagineAir made its first flight in early 2007. With a fleet of five Cirrus SR22-GTSs and 15 [...]

FAA held a customer service seminar last week in Chicago. I always chuckle a bit when someone combines the FAA acronym with anything that even sounds like customer service. Sorry PT & DB. But then, today’s my birthday so I suppose most readers will indulge me a bit of curmudgeonly prose (and no, I won’t [...]

If you haven’t heard, the Internet and blogs like JetWhine are killing print journalism. Slowly, community journalists, everyday people with an interest in their community, are becoming our primary source of news. If you doubt this, watch TV news and count how many times the talking heads attribute part of their stories–or the subjects themselves–to [...]

Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee this morning, but I’m not sure how to take an article in the current issue of Wired, “Air Repair: Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New York City.” It reminds me of that 1976 cover of the New Yorker magazine, where the land west of [...]

I don’t know what makes me more angry, the story in the Wall Street Journal that claims investigators are pointing the finger of blame at the pilots of the Dash 8 Q400 in the Buffalo crash a few weeks ago, or that from a pilot-training perspective we seem to be reliving a reality that should [...]