Years ago in another life, I was a VFR tower controller at a number of then really busy airports, Chicago Palwaukee (now Chicago Executive), Chicago DuPage, Chicago Meigs and Miami Opa-Locka. As a pilot and a newly minted flight instructor, I always enjoyed the chance to chat with student and private pilots who would appear [...]

At Kent State University in Ohio, students hoping for a career in two failing industries–aviation and publishing–have joined forces to improve the future of both by starting an online aviation magazine. Its tag line, “Grass Roots. Blue Sky,” summarizes the content of  Stories That Fly. Produced by the School of Journalism & Mass Communication and [...]

After reading reports of faltering flight schools, I wandered over to the Fox Valley Technical College’s aviation campus on the Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to see how things were going in flyover country. Not so bad, it seems. There I met Amanda White (that’s her on the left) and Elizabeth Amweg.  They graduated [...]

It gives me great pleasure to announce Jetwhine’s latest collaboration with Shashank Nigam’s SimpliFlying. Shashank is a Boston and Singapore-based self-professed airline geek who loves marketing. Shashank creates brand initiatives with airlines and airports that drive and create meaningful conversations with consumers, often through social media. And he’s merged his passions for branding and airlines [...]

Every year about this time aviation writers around the globe start getting a little goose bumpy wondering if they made the cut. Making the cut means you’ve been nominated by the World Leadership Forum for the Aerospace Journalist of the Year awards. The list includes the top five or six writers in a dozen different [...]

Here’s a new installment of our sporadic Fun Friday adventures. From a couple of Jetwhine readers I now share a couple of very funny videos. The first, a new piece of Air New Zealand branding in a way only the folks next to the folks down under can do it. Imagine United trying something like [...]

Aviation history is written by the triad of people, planes, and places, and news about any of the three always catches my attention. The National Trust for Historic Preservation recently published its 22nd annual list of the nation’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places. On it is the hangar at the Wendover, Utah, airfield that protected [...]

The NTSB meets this week to ask the tough questions about February’s Dash 8 crash in Buffalo. They’ll be looking at icing effects on aircraft performance, cold weather operations, sterile cockpit rules, crew experience, fatigue management, and stall recovery training. The one that jumped out at me as an old regional airline pilot is the [...]

Ever since I can remember personal flying has always represented the lion’s share of the general aviation fleet and hours flown, measured by the FAA’s annual GA and Part 135 survey. The most current data is for 2007, well before the economy reached full meltdown, and it suggests trends that are puzzling in their contradictions: [...]