Category: Excerpts –  Page 3

Falling Out of the Sky

I found myself with a week clear in Southern Spain; free time spanning in front of me and not a single claim to my time. Add to that a Piper Saratoga parked in Málaga gathering dust and it was clear: it was time to go flying. After months of bad weather followed by hectic schedules…

Read more… 9 Jan 09

Fly By Night

Part One of Two – originally published in Piper Flyer Flying feels different in the dark. Sitting in a commercial plane, looking at the black outside the window, the viewpoint strikes me as so completely different. This isn’t an issue during the day, I look out at cities and farmland and lakes and railway lines:…

Read more… 12 Dec 08

Woman Drivers

Kidlington Airfield, now known as Oxford Airport, has been in use since the 1930s. Their training history began in World War II when it was used as a training centre for Royal Air Force pilots. Today, even with a downturn in new pilots, 73% of their traffic is training flights. Their circuit can get very…

Read more… 7 Nov 08

Just Being Helpful

Cliff taxied the plane over to the pumps and I hopped out to get us some fuel. “I’ll get out in a moment,” Cliff said. “I just want to put our route into the GPS first.” “No problem.” I walked over to the tiny booth behind the pumps and tapped at the door. A pale…

Read more… 19 Sep 08

Early Morning Confusion

Cliff shoved my shoulder. “Wake up.” I squinted and realised it was still dark. The shutters act as my alarm clock but they weren’t due to rise for another half an hour. I ignored him and rolled over. “Get up,” he said. “It’s your birthday.” I put the pillow over my head. “Wake up! Come…

Read more… 10 Mar 08

The Night Before

I’m working on an article called Sylvia’s Mother at the moment (er, if you are my editor, read “working on” as “finishing off”. I swear you’ll have it by Friday) and wrote about my thoughts before taking my mom and my son up in the Saratoga. This is from my initial draft. I can’t help…

Read more… 17 Oct 07

Accident Reports

Explosive Decompression on the Ground

The Gulfstream G150, a twin-engine business jet, arrived at Kittilä airport in Lapland on a cold Tuesday afternoon on the 2nd of January 2018, carrying three crew and four passengers.…

I am the problem: PSA flight 1771

On the 7th of December in 1987, Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 1771 departed Los Angeles International for a scheduled passenger flight to San Francisco. There were five crew and thirty-eight…

Demystifying

Small Plane Gets Stoned

This photograph has been posted to aviation forums repeatedly, each time with a thread of pilots wondering what the hell could have happened to cause the light aircraft to be…

How do you pronounce…?

This is a very interesting article by Allen Amsbaugh which was originally published in NASA’s ASRS Directline about the issues of navigational fixes which sound or look similar. The ASRS…

History

The Last Flight of B121-120

The Beagle B.121 Pup is a British, single-engine, all-metal aircraft produced in the 1960s. British Executive and General Aviation Limited, who traded as BEAGLE, designed the Beagle B.121 Pup as…

Abused fighter planes and the men who love them

A few months ago, I wrote about how to shoot down a fighter jet while flying it, the case of a test-pilot in a Grumman F-11 Tiger who managed to…

Fun Stuff

Jetpacks and Wingwalking: 2020 keeps getting weirder

Twenty-twenty was always an interesting sounding year, popular with futurists and science fiction writers for having something of a ring to it, a year in which clean fuel and commercial…

Microsoft Flight Simulator: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Microsoft Flight Simulator has released a new version, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, fourteen years after the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator X. The timing couldn’t be better, of course, with…