Blog Posts

Everyone at PWK tower thought Bob Richards was interesting, in a rather curious way, when he began his air traffic control career back in the early 1980s. Not weird, but more quirky, like a guy holding back some part of his personality, at least at …

Standing at the bent and battered nose of a Vietnam-era C-123 Provider at the National Museum of the US Air Force and wondering why there was a World War II P-47 Thunderbolt snuggled under its left wing, a middle-aged blonde walked up, looked at the…

A Unique Around-the-World Journey Heads East As you read this story, Mason Andrews should be winging his way eastward out of Italy toward Croatia while sitting in the left seat of his dad’s Piper Lance (a link to the full podcast is at the bottom of…

After its unusual start, EAA AirVenture Oshkosh returned to its predicable ways as the week passed the halfway mark. But is was just setting us up, out of the west, just above the trees and behind the backs of everyone facing the flight line for the…

No two repetitions of the the annual gathering of the aviation faithful at EAA AirVenture at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, are the same. But in attending the event for the 40th time, I can honestly say that all of them share clearl…

Just six months on the job as Enstrom Helicopter’s production test pilot, Cody Parkovich traces his position to the night he was bartending in Marinette, Wisconsin, just across the river from Menominee, Michigan. “That night I found out, when I was …

In the simplest terms, a helicopter’s rotor blade is a wing that generates lift by flying in a circle. But the similarity between a wing and rotor pretty much ends at the airfoil because the forces acting on each of them is vastly different. Imagine…

By Micah Engber Al Bean. I just liked saying the name when I was a kid. It was a cool name, sounded like he would be a cool guy, what a neat name for an astronaut, for the fourth person to ever set foot on the moon. If it weren’t for that cool name…

Photo courtesy David Massey — Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Pilot pride comes with the certificates and ratings achieved through successful checkrides. But like flying itself, maintaining one’s pilot pride properly is a never-ending effort. …

Favorite Flights I Never Flew, by Micah Engber, contributor The mid to late 1980’s were the heyday of Frequent Flyer Programs. Since deregulation, the advent of low-cost airlines a-la People Express and Southwest, the mainline carriers were searchin…

For many in aviation, attending EAA AirVenture Oshkosh is an annual touchstone and we recall our participation in many ways. Mine is a memory bin, the yellow office trash can I got from Crate & Barrel when the U.S. Navy finished with me in February …

Drawn to small airports that will not chase me away from the runway’s sideline where I capture the ground-t0-air photos of the homebuilt airplane builders I profile, each is a still-life statement on the vitality of general aviation.  All too often …

Mother Nature’s springtime blizzard that dumped more than a foot of snow over an appetizer of freezing rain and ice encouraged me to spend the weekend indoors. Searching for some clue of how many more courses this banquet of wind and snow she would …

Ah, springtime. Any day now it should finally stop snowing. As the snow melts, puddles, and sublimates from airport operation areas, airplanes will emerge from their T-hangar hibernations and start sniffing the sky on sunny weekends. In preparation …

Reading that the FAA will end its contract for the Direct User Access Terminal Service (DUATS) on May 16, 2018, caught me by surprise. The surprise was not that the FAA was not renewing its support of the service. The surprise was that it had alread…

Asking newly met people their occupations is a phatic conversation starter that leads me down the semantic rabbit hole. Upon learning that I’m a word merchant, they ask what I write about. After hearing “aviation,” they ask if I’m a pilot, which is …

“Convenience,” wrote Tim Wu in The Tyranny of Convenience, “more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks—has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies.” From a passenger’s perspective, aviati…

Many owners like to personalize their prized aircraft with an N-number that represents them, often with their initials. Before the advent of NextGen, painting the new number on the airplane, and professing it to ATC, covered the customization. Now, …

The DC-3, a C-47 “Gooney Bird” when it’s dressed up for the military, conjures intense memories for me, like when my parents bought me an airline ticket to fly back from school in Champaign IL to Chicago one Thanksgiving. That Ozark DC-3 ride was my…

When it came time for Dennis Hutchinson to paint the Davis DA-2 he’d restored, he picked red and white with gold and blue accents, “because I like them and think they go well together.” Aesthetics had little do with how he arranged those colors on t…

Bruce McCandless, the Astronaut In the Iconic Photo, by Micah Engber Listen to the episode or read it below When you think about the first space walk maybe you think about Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov who in March 1965 was the first man to ever leave th…

It has been decades since I’ve read any science fiction. Roaming the dusty shelves of my memory’s recall, the last such cover I cracked was called, I think, The Way Station. Like the other tomes I’d read in the genre, it described a fantastic future…

Happy New Year! I hope you all shared a safe and joyous celebration with family and friends. And warm. Let’s not forget warm. The air temp was double digits below zero here in Wisconsin, and the wind chill was about three times that. Avoiding hypoth…

It’s Kitty Hawk Day. Every December 17 I take a few moments to thank aviation for enriching my life and to appreciate the contributions and sacrifices of those, past and present, that made it  possible. This reflection often involves an associated r…