Commentary

Throughout a career spanning 47 years and nearly 12,000 flight hours as a pilot, I have been a diligent maintainer of flight logs and, with very few exceptions, my logbooks contain entries for every flight. Nearly all these flights were pleasant experiences, a few were somewhat less than enjoyable — but taken together they are […]

Click the photos in this story for larger versions.Each large image will open in a new window/tab. The ladies are packed in the twin Otter. The cameramen land. The Shorts leads the Otters on takeoff. Practicing the formation on the ground right before boarding the aircraft. This was hot! Practicing how to leave the formation […]

The Real Deal click for a larger image Having an instrument rating doesn’t mean that you have to fly in the clouds-it just means that you can, legally. In fact, the FAA doesn’t require a pilot to have any experience whatsoever flying in actual IMC in order to qualify for, or maintain, an instrument rating. […]

[AVweb’s reprint of A Pilot’s History began with Chapter 1.] Today, I look back on the years of stimulating growth in aviation during World War II. As a pilot, I saw great nations competing against one another to design and build aircraft in huge numbers, upon which their very survival would depend. The best brains […]

[AVweb’s reprint of A Pilot’s History began with Chapter 1.] Jeanne and I did some boating and relaxed as a family. I wrote a letter to Arthur Vining Davis letting him know I was free from any contracts and, if he cared to speak to me regarding employment, I was readily available. I soon received […]

[AVweb’s reprint of A Pilot’s History began with Chapter 1.] Jenks had done a very good job on the executive aircraft (see Chap. 10, Part 1), proving he was a very talented man. A few days later, he had a meeting with Al and Ray and thereafter did not appear at work. Thomas, the individual […]

[AVweb’s reprint of A Pilot’s History began with Chapter 1.] In Florida, I had “the sun early in the morning and the moon at night” for a couple of days before the phone started to ring. You can ignore it for a few days, but soon someone will buzz your house in a plane or […]

“We’ve been gone over 50 days now, and had just one weather-related delay,” says Thierry Pouille, organizer of Air Journey’s unique round- the-world GA tour, now in Asia. “It’s just chance, really!,” he admits, noting that several times weather would have been a factor if they had planned to fly just a day before or […]

When we left our intrepid round-the-world pilots two weeks ago, they were about to launch for a flight up the Nile. First stop was Abu Simbel, two ancient, massive rock temples on the western bank of Lake Nasser, southwest of Aswan. A nearby airfield made it a convenient stop, and the visit was specatacular, despite […]

The RTW pilots left Paris behind them and took off for Marrakech, in Morrocco, on the northwestern coast of Africa. The distance of about 1,100 nm meant only the PC-12 and the Cessna Conquest could fly nonstop. The TBM 700 and Cessna Mustang crews planned a stop in Gibraltar, near the southernmost tip of the […]