Blog Posts

The day after Thanksgiving, Sporty’s Academy shared news of a week that any flight school would love to have, four first solos, two new private pilots, two new commercial pilots, and a new flight instructor. The cooperation of Mother Nature made it …

Beyond the kids, one of the pleasures of substitute teaching at Omro High School is talking with its principal, Brett Steffen. Infected in adulthood, he’s got a chronic case of aviation passion. I like it when he stops by during my student-free plan…

When a single trip to the bargain matinee equals my monthly Netflix subscription, for most movies my frugality partners with patience and we add the title to our queue. On a 1997 date night, my wife and I saw Air Force One, and she didn’t really enj…

One of the first things I learned as a graduate student at Northwestern’s Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program 20 years ago and years later as a teacher in that same program was the value of a brand. Managing a brand is so important pe…

Given the rapid pace of change in cockpit technology, it’s really sad in a self-destructive way at how slowly change has come to the training paradigm that puts new pilots in those cockpits. With few exceptions, the way an instructor educates a new …

When you live in Wisconsin, where this October day never really dawned under thick ominous clouds and the temperature is struggling to reach the 40s, an e-mail about flying to the Bahamas really gets a pilot’s attention. And by doing so, earning a c…

Those with a proclivity for cynicism might judge this headline an oxymoron equal to military intelligence. But before you snigger and stop reading, consider this:  under its Center of Excellence banner, the FAA has selected a team of universities wi…

There’s no small amount of irony in the fact that American Airlines axed the contracts of their pilots just a few hours past Labor Day last month. Kind of adds insult to injury. I feel for the pilots having been around to watch the ugliness of Midwa…

Working my way around Lake Michigan last week, I passed a small airport in Northport. This village of 526 people is at ring-fingertip of lower Michigan’s left-handed mitten. The fieldstone terminal with a conical roof in bumble-bee colors on its ope…

Certainly more details about its new Center to Advance the Pilot Community will be broadcast during October’s AOPA Aviation Summit in Palm Springs, but that doesn’t satisfy my need to know now. Ah, curiosity is an impatient task master, so I sat dow…

Here in Wisconsin, a swing state, we have been incessantly pummeled by political ads of both parties. This onslaught has been painfully punctuated almost daily by political surveys whose questions do little more than support the delusions of the per…

For the 34th year, the FAA has reached out to aircraft owners and Part 135 operators to take the pulse of general aviation. What’s sad is that over the years, many of my friends lucky enough to own an airplane rarely took the time to complete the su…

Thanks to my comrades at The Airplane Geeks Show for staying way ahead of me and posting my annual Labor Day message. In case you don’t listen to our show — impossible as that might be — do give this link a quick click. Promise I don’t pontificate t…

Reading Neil Armstrong’s obit in the New York Times led to an unexpected epiphany: As the inaugural pioneers, the collective public faces of singular accomplishments achieved during the first century of powered flight pass, what events of equivalent…

Less than a decade ago, when the symptom’s of aviation’s decline were firmly manifested, a number of aviation’s alphabet organizations focused mostly on increasing their slice of a shrinking pie. With the number of active pilots and new pilots shrin…

Until the other day, I thought a troll was one of those horrid little creatures living under bridges just waiting for the chance to reach up and scare the dickens out of some little kid. But lo and behold, as a reader told me, a troll in the Interne…

Discussing the dismal number of student starts in the 1990s, my Flight Training magazine coworkers and I wondered how flight schools located where the nonflying public congregate, like shopping malls, might fare. Learning about two new aviation educ…

At every turn, it seemed that everyone at EAA AirVenture 2012 had an Apple iPad, except me and one or two others. Aviation apps were hot items this year, and several of them would make effective, essential tools for pilots in training. First up is J…

With its huge, preselected aviation audience, EAA AirVenture is the ultimate dog-and-pony stage on which many companies debut new hardware and software. Significant this year are new airplanes that offer a good balance between price and performance,…

Since I started attending EAA AirVenture professionally, as an exhibitor in 1989, and then an employee, and now as a journalist, my greatest joy is covering the site from the North 40 to ultralights, and just letting what’s new rise up and grab my a…

Boeing released its periodic Pilot & Technician Outlook at Farnborough on July 11. In hours the global media started producing stories of future doom because of the shortage and said that the new pilots trained over the next 20 years would be less q…

Bird strikes have been one of my passing interests ever since I watched the head-on confrontation between a seagull and A landing A-6 during a wheels’ watch at NAS Alameda in the early 1970s. (The seagull lost, by the way.) Somewhere over the years …

Every so often work becomes fun. OK, admittedly, not very often. When the folks at Aviation International News asked me to check out the new Brake-to-Vacate system Airbus had designed, they mentioned I’d have a chance to see it in action since the t…

This YouTube video is but one half of Georgia’s airport promotion. Seeking escape from pervasive bad-new morosity I quickly discovered some really good and uplifting aviation activity in Georgia, which recently launched a two-part promotion, Geor…