I’m in transit this week, somewhere between time zones, airport coffee, and the unsettling suspicion that I’ve forgotten something important.

The article about a double-engine failure that I planned to finish in advance kept getting more complicated. At the point where I thought “maybe this is a three-part article”, I realised that I wasn’t going to finish it in time. The back-up article that I had half-ready, a crash that took out three acres of land but somehow no people, turned out not to be half ready at all. That was fine because I still had a follow-up article to an old incident that I thought I could pull together really quickly. Somehow even that one became unwieldy once I started to put together all the interesting details.

Now I’m somewhere over the Atlantic on the first leg of a six-week trip, with a half-finished article about a Cirrus SR22 ditching (Gatorade bottle, C-130, you’ll see) that needed more time than I had.

Rather than publish something rushed or incomplete, I’ll be back next Friday with a proper article. And after that, I’ll be on the ground in New Mexico for the Legacy of Liberty Air Show at Holloman AFB (the Patriots Jet Team are headlining with six L-39 Albatrosi!), so expect me to come back full of it.