Oh, I have quite a few things to write about, since I've flown both directions across the continent. I've crossed the northern border to our colder brother to the north. I'm working on those entries, but in the meantime, just a little news: The Federal Aviation Administration controls the...

Flying little airplanes with single engines you want to climb up as high as you can. Altitude is safety, since if something goes wrong you have some time to glide toward a good emergency landing spot and some time to diagnose and solve the problem. Thinner air up higher means the airplane faces...

An adventure is only an adventure if it has the potential for something to go a little wrong. A bad magneto is certainly always possible when flying, and that’s what happened to us trying to cross the country. As misadventures go, this one only cost us time. No one was hurt, the airplane was not...

AOG. Dreaded triad of the alphabet for pilots. Airplane On Ground. Almost always due to a maintenance issue. Last night was our second night spent in Albuquerque. People I spoke to about being stuck at ABQ all said, "Oh, I love Albuquerque." Well, I might love it if I were here voluntarily. Maybe...

The engine in a piston-powered airplane is not like the engine in your automobile. It is much more primitive. Until fairly recently they still had carburetors. In fact, when you rent planes you are sometimes climbing into a thirty year old plane and it will still have a carburetor. Ours has fuel...

On Tuesday morning at 0800 Adam and I will leave Santa Monica Airport for Carroll County Regional Airport in Westminster, Maryland. (Nell and the boys will follow on JetBlue, arriving in Boston on Saturday morning. Then we'll be able to flit up and and down the East coast, starting with a week in...

So I have these cute little yellow chocks. They are steel, perforated with large holes to keep the weight down, and low profile. The wheel pants on the Diamondstar come down closer to the tarmac than most wheel pants. That makes them more aerodynamic and makes the plane faster, but it also means...

Okay, maybe that’s not fair. Maybe I hate them all. But I particularly dislike making the mistake I made today. The radio tunes to different frequencies. There’s a knob you twist to set the frequency and then a button (the flip flop button) to move the newly-dialed frequency into the active...

So the rule I follow is that if maintenance has been done on the plane I make the first flight alone and I stay over the field for at least fifteen minutes. That way, if something goes wrong I can just glide back to the field. Today I went down to Long Beach where a different shop was working on my...

Occasionally I get a note from another pilot asking about my flying, my training, the plane, or the airport. Usually the advice is too specific for general readers, but my reply to this one was long enough that it was worth posting on the site. Pilot, who wrote, owns his own little Piper airplane...