From October 9 to December 6 I did not fly an airplane. That’s the longest I have gone since learning HOW to fly an airplane. That was disorienting and a little depressing. It coincided with dropping Dexter at school and having a truly empty nest for the first time, so it was difficult to know what...

When I wrote up my impressions of the Diamondstar after my first few flights, I didn’t dwell on the three drawbacks that I noticed even after my first test flight in the plane: 1. The canopy offers incredible views, but that means that you get warmed by the sun. A lot. 2. The seats, which are...

Please stop flying below mandatory FAA regulations over Venice. Actually, stop flying over Venice period. That was a comment posted on one of the pages of the blog. I don’t approve comments if they are from an anonymous account, I think that’s a bad policy for a web presence unless there’s some...

(Many thanks to Demetri Martin for the hours of laughs as we buzzed through the sky. Dexter found Demetri on YouTube, then downloaded his comedy albums and would often be laughing hysterically in the back seat as I was preparing for an instrument approach. Demetri has a bit about batteries and how...

Oh, that’s sort of sad for Otto. So trustworthy (except when he’s not). In my head, the KAP 140 in the new plane is the same pilot as the one that was in the old plane. The operation and display are identical, and I talked to Otto the same way when I am flying solo: “Time to climb, Otto,” “Let’s...

I appear to have lost the "blog roll" portion of my sidebar. I'll have to fix that eventually. But one of the blogs over there is Photographic Logbook, which always seems clever to me because you want to snap some photographs anyway, your logbook does not include enough description and the pictures...

I occasionally peruse the online community of Reddit. I'm not an active member and I don't even change the sub-reddits which are shown when I login. One of the sections I read regularly is called Today I Learned, or TIL for short. It is a good reminder for me that there is a depth to human...

The first crossing in the new plane seemed important to document. I failed on a few fronts (as soon as I announced I was on the east coast my brother asked how many gallons of fuel I burned; I realized I had neglected to log that), but I’ll try to make up for it on the return flight. I started on...

Yesterday in an Uber which was dropping me at the Santa Monica Airport, the driver said, "Did you see that pilot who crashed in Van Nuys?" He said it with the usual hook of discussing current events: this is something interesting to talk about. I said, "Yes, that was my friend Art." He became...

On Tuesday, August 2, I was having lunch in Guymon, Oklahoma, a place in the middle of nowhere. Or, more accurately, in the middle of the panhandle of Oklahoma, a hard, hot, high bit of the country which feels like it owes no one any favors. I was incredibly surprised to find a place on Yelp! that...