Update: our plane sold on August 2, 2023. It will be the end of an era and I will write more about it in the fall, but we have put our current plane up for sale. There are long, complicated reasons, but the short version is that it is too difficult to get to the airport, which means less flying,...

Maybe you have seen the hullabaloo about "Artificial Intelligence." That's not the correct term, but it is the term people are using. Marvin Minsky famously always said artificial intelligence was just twenty years away. He was saying that for more than twenty years. I was in a hotel room in Dallas...

A fellow on the Internet who is over in the UK and is hoping to eventually start his training to be a pilot has written to me with some questions. Usually they are fairly specific, the replies are short, and I just shoot them back in an email. Even when they are things that can be answered with an...

Back at the end of May 2022 we were looking at one our first adventures since the pandemic began. It’s amazing how few opportunities we had to get out and hop around in the little plane with things shut down, fewer gatherings to head to and so on. And for me, wearing a mask was often a reminder of...

My brother and his son Abel were visiting my parents up on Lake Wah Wash Kesh so I decided to head north and see all of them for a couple nights. The weather for the Monday morning flight I had planned shift so that it looked difficult to get out of Norwood (fog, LIFR), so I bumped things up a...

If you read this entry you saw Dexter's plague doctor in various spots as he crossed the country. After a summer of research on San Juan Island, Dexter returned to the east coast (Kenmore Air & JetBlue), spent a week in New Hampshire with friends, and then needed to return to Ottawa.

For the forty-first crossing I was trying to get through the northern Rockies between Seattle and Billings, Montana. This was the view on ForeFlight on the morning I was departing. That storm, which stubbornly sat over the Rockies for three days, dumped so much rain on the Yosemite Valley that it...

Dexter will be spending half his summer on San Juan Island in the University of Washington’s fish laboratories studying the creatures he is most interested in. Of all of the summers he has visited the labs this will be the first time that will be enrolled in the graduate course the makes the labs...

What is probably the greatest aviation short story recounted live, “The LA Speed Story,” has a moment in it that I only noticed after a few times hearing it. It’s just a phrase when Shul is describing how perfect the flight is: “Not a needle was moving.” Screaming through the sky faster than a...

In aviation there is an important focus on ADM. Aeronautical Decision Making. It is the way to answer a question like, “Is it safe to fly from Santa Monica to Catalina today?” and “Can I put all this stuff in the plane with these people and fly over there for lunch?”