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Kermit found me morose. I was sitting in my lounge chair in my home office, staring dolefully at my “I love me” wall. Most general aviation and military pilots have an “I love me” wall or shelf in their homes. It is a place to hang all those squadron pictures, awards, plaques, old epaulets, retirement […]

It was good to be back in Lakeland for Sun ‘n Fun and even better to have been there for the 75-degree sunny days rather than the almost-annual deluge that showed up later in the week. As shows go, it was slow for news, but news certainly wasn’t absent. Moreover, it showed that the spirit […]

I listen to a lot of ATC tapes and the latest was about the flap damage on the Southwest flight at Denver Sunday morning. When pieces fall off an airplane in flight it’s a flat-out, hair-on-fire emergency. Neither the controllers nor the pilots know for sure what has been damaged and even though decisions are […]

Non-pilots may be hard to deal with, but we all must interact with them from time to time, and this was my time. I was pickleballing at the local pickleballing venue with a group of tottering and doddering old friends. We were staying out of the kitchen and, because of our advanced age, found ourselves […]

One of the hazards of this job is inadvertently becoming a poser. It’s easy to appear more knowledgeable about topics on which you have no direct experience so the golden rule is to attribute every fact to a credible source. Still, there seem to be a lot of people who think I have personal experience […]

While I am all in favor of a healthy respect for weather among VFR pilots, I also believe there could be excessive fear instilled during the training process that makes an inadvertent encounter with IMC more dangerous than it needs to be. Having gotten my private-pilot certificate in 1981, I was a VFR-only pilot for […]

The forums and news threads went berserk when Garmin sounded the warning horn last year that the parts bins stocked with major components to maintain the world-conquering GNS-series navigators are thinning, and that owners should start planning an upgrade. Garmin Service Advisory (23018 Rev. B) makes it official, saying in part that display repairs for […]

As you can imagine, we get a lot of email here at AVweb and it’s frankly overwhelming. Over the years I’ve learned to discern the potentially fruitful communications in terms of newsworthiness, and I open and read them carefully. The rest, I’m afraid, run the risk of remaining unopened on our server and for that […]

You talk too much  You even worry my pet You just talk…  Talk too much       Joe Jones What a nice day to go flying! I had spent an hour or so committing flagrant acts of aviation with my rag-wing Cessna 140, and after the obligatory three touch-and-goes, I parked it next to my […]

So, when it first popped up on one of the aviation networks that I frequent I decided not to bite on it. The crew of a United 737 MAX 8 misjudged a taxiway turn and collapsed the left main in the mud. Minor incidents like this are a tough call when it comes to news […]