Blog Posts

This past week the mailman delivered a reason to think about my unknown but rapidly approaching expiration date. Thanking me for my four decade membership tenure, EAA offered me a three-figure rebate if I bought a four-figure lifetime membership. T…

Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well. Time to Give ATC an “Atta Boy” Most aviation stories only s…

A side benefit of visiting Reading, Pennsylvania, where two of my wife’s three sons (and 6.5 of her 11.5 grandchildren) reside is catching up on the Mid Atlantic Air Museum’s restoration of its P-61 Black Widow. When I first saw the airplane in 1995…

As the photo here shows, it looks like an old Aero Commander, and when I first saw this photo that was my initial identification. And then I noticed that the tail feathers were lower, and that the horizontal stab didn’t have the Commander’s dihedra…

On Monday, September 29, I completed a lifetime quest of visiting all 50 states by chasing ghosts at Brunswick Executive Airport (BXM), the former Naval Air Station Brunswick Maine. I chose it because my late father, a naval aviator, served here as …

The classroom was a 150 hp PA-12 Super Cruiser on floats How many times during an airline pre-takeoff briefing have you heard the flight attendant say, “In the event of a water landing …” Trust me, there ain’t no such thing as a water landing in an …

Note to the World’s Best Readers / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well. I wouldn’t be much of an aviation write…

There are many ways to look at the recent spate of passenger confrontations resulting from one reclining into the knees and face of another. The confrontations have been occurring for years, ever since the airline MBAs started shrinking the seat pi…

Over the past century dreamers have invested in their vision of a flying car. There’s a good catalog of them in a recent New York Time article, “Why We’re Not Driving the Friendly Skies.” Expanding on the article’s headline, the author, Stuart F. Br…

Idealists in 18th and 19th century America founded a number of utopian communities. Falling victim to their cultural and social ideals, they rarely lasted into the 20th century, and in the 21st century the Amana Colonies, Shakers, and Oneida Communi…

Note to the World’s Best Readers / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well.  One obstacle to learning to fly these …

“What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen at AirVenture this year?” For the past 15 or 20 years, this is the question I dread because I never have an answer for my interlocutors. Don’t get me wrong, I find many things interesting at AirVenture every yea…

If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, click here to listen to the program. ____________________________ I was working on a couple of a stories related to the Malaysian Airlines tragedy over the weekend when an idea popped into my head. The Nall Repor…

AP photo of the MH17 site in eastern Ukraine The trouble with an aircraft accident that happens on the other side of the world for we Americans, especially one that occurs in a battle zone, is understanding which source speaks the truth about what’s…

On a two-wheeled vagabondage adventure, I reunited with my riding buddy in Seattle, and he’s leading us east toward Oshkosh. For those unfamiliar, vagabondage has a direction of travel, like east, but no route or itinerary. Except for one must-see s…

I had an opportunity to visit the normally closed-to-the-public NTSB Training Center near Leesburg Virginia a few weeks ago as a guest of director Paul Schuda assisted by Senior Air Safety Investigator Bill English. To say my visit was eye opening w…

Fresh evidence has been uncovered in the disappearance of Malaysian flight 370 (MH370) according to The Telegraph of London. To date, there hasn’t been one single shred of physical evidence that proves any of the dozen or so theories about what hap…

At American airports these days is hard to find a good word from pilots about their aviation future. After covering the 57th Sonex Aircraft Builder’s Workshop at the company’s Oshkosh, Wisconsin, hangars it seems clear I’ve been looking in all the w…

First let’s talk a little reality … Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), or drones as most of us refer to them are coming … and they’re coming soon. That’s not necessarily all bad though. Drones can operate in places that are not safe to send a manned air…

Recovered from his landing mishap in the Pacific Northwest, Richard Bach has resumed his online conversation, and he is as thought provoking as ever. In “Change of an Era” he reflects on the change progress has always brought to aviation, and the c…

Memorial Day here in the United States is one of the days we remember all the men and women who served and perished in armed conflicts around the world since our own Civil War in the mid-1800s. The stories emerging about how poorly we treat these me…

A recent New York Times story, “Air Travel Economics Make Midsize Hubs Unprofitable“, explained why airline travel today often demands long drives to the nearest major airline hub. This withdrawal of service from outlying communities and hubs makes …

I like hanging around with other flight instructors. Not only do they understand how an airplane flies, but they also know the intricacies of those dark corners of a flight envelope … things that can lead a new pilot down a rabbit hole of trouble if…

When my wife and I were married a long time ago, we promised ourselves that if we ever had kids and wanted to travel on an airplane, we’d just fork over the extra money for a ticket. To us, the risk of injury should they fly out of our hands during …