I was born in a workshop in Wichita, Kansas, in 1951 and registered with serial number 15695. Right after my test flight, my new owners, who had ordered me a few months before, took me on my first cross-country flight over the states of Oklahoma and Texas and across the Río Grande into Mexico.

Cruising along at 8500 feet in his Tecnam P2008, Mike Hackney captured this beautiful and slightly strange photo. As he says, "The optical illusion was of a lake covered by a sheet of ice, and the cloud tops emerging. This went on for an hour of flight time. Simply beautiful."

The FAA’s official recommendation on losing power after takeoff is to proceed straight ahead and not to attempt to return to the runway or airport. That existing policy position by the FAA assumes there is an open area available for a successful touchdown. The second assumption is that pilot skill level is not sufficient to execute a 180-degree turn in order to return to landing without stalling and spinning in. Both positions are not much help.

I asked ALCC if they had any runway lighting. They stated that that field did not have any lighting. I told ALCC to stand by. I got out my list for the artillery units for that location, called the first unit and asked if they had any parachute flares. They responded that they did, and I asked them to pop one.

You're flying in visible moisture with the air temperature below freezing and you notice something building up on the leading edge of the wings. Is that airframe icing? What you see collecting on the wing leading edges in a cold cloud could be airframe icing, or it could be snow. Icing is bad, maybe very bad, but snow isn’t much of a problem. How do you know the difference?

It should be clear that when expecting/encountering turbulence, that pilots should fly a speed that is slower than Va by at least the value of the maximum gust—airspeed gain—they expect to encounter, and higher than Vs1 by the same value for potential airspeed loss. Va is simply too fast!