Friday Photo: Richard Collins with Concorde

There were many important airplanes in Richard Collins's life, including his Cessna P210, N40RC, which he flew for almost 9,000 hours. Close behind that special airplane was Concorde, the groundbreaking supersonic airliner. He rode on it 14 times, flew the simulator, and became good friends with John Cook, a British Airways captain on the graceful bird.
Richard Collins' Cessna P210

Learning from the master

I first met Dick in the Park Avenue offices of FLYING Magazine, but I got to know Dick – and learned to fly – in Dick’s real office, the cockpit of 40RC, his Cessna P210. During my years at FLYING as a staffer and then as a freelance columnist, I made about 110 flights in over 500 hours in 40RC.

The best in the world, and a truly good man

Memories are stored like snapshots in a shoebox. Moments frozen in time. Dick Collins was hunched over his typewriter tapping away that day in the fall of 1964 when I first saw him. He politely said hello, but kept working against a deadline as his father, Leighton Collins, showed me around the Air Facts office in Princeton, New Jersey.

Meeting him was like meeting God

To a neophyte pilot and aviation journalist in the 1970s, meeting Richard L. Collins for the first time was like meeting God. It was at the 1978 Reading Show in Pennsylvania, and I was in my fourth year as an editor and writer with the British weekly Flight International. As a pilot, I devoured FLYING magazine from cover to cover each month; as a writer, I regarded it with awe.
Cessna P210

Personal flying’s greatest champion

I was so lucky to work for and with Richard for more than 40 years. Richard refused to be called an aviation journalist. What he did, and I did, at FLYING magazine, and for him at AOPA Pilot, and then for Air Facts Journal on the web, is personal aviation promotion. Richard championed the cause of using our own airplanes for personal travel on our own schedule with a maximum of schedule reliability and safety.
Richard Collins

Working with an icon for over 40 years

The thing with Richard is that I knew him as a coworker and colleague and friend and sometimes forgot his icon status. Once, in Oshkosh, he and I were walking to our table for dinner in a local restaurant and I became aware that people were whispering and nodding in our direction. It made me uncomfortable, until I heard someone say, “That’s Richard Collins,” and I felt like a celebrity.

Aviation’s everyman hero

Dick wouldn’t have wanted a long tribute. While nobody ever accused him of lacking confidence, Richard Collins was a surprisingly quiet and private man. His idea of a memorial would be a tall glass of whiskey and a nod. But I hope you’ll forgive me if I ignore his wishes and remember the life of a legend - and my aviation hero.

Friday Photo: commuting home at sunrise

After a nearly 30 year break, I finally had a mission: visiting and tending to my two oldest children who began attending a boarding school in Dillard, Georgia. My wife and two youngest children have now relocated to the area and I commute there on the weekends to be with them. I'm now treated to amazing views like this one, and a warm homecoming, nearly every weekend.
Cessna 150 panel

My first flight in actual IMC as an instrument student

At one point, I was so tensed up, worn out from fighting the wind and trying to get needles centered, that I thought, “I just can’t do this. I should just give up and let Jack fly it in. This is so hard. Maybe I should just give up flying altogether.” Those thoughts lasted for just a brief moment when I heard Jack’s encouragement again, and I said to myself, “I can do this. I want to do this. Just do it.”

Beech X700: The Starship that could have been

Beech, as every successful company does, had ongoing efforts to design improved and replacement airplanes for the company line. In the late 1970s John Pike had his preliminary design group perform configuration studies on airplanes that could supersede Beech’s King Air 90 and 200 stalwart turboprops. The X700 seemed to be the best idea, but it was never made.

Caption Contest #10

Welcome to our latest Caption Contest at Air Facts, where we post a photo and call on our very talented readers to provide a caption for that photo. Check out our most recent one below and if an amusing or clever caption comes to mind, just post it as a comment. In two weeks, we’ll cut off this contest and the staff of Air Facts will choose their favorite caption.
Student with CFI

If you want to be a pilot, you better believe!

Oh how I concentrated as the flight progressed, identifying those check points, talking to flight following, receiving timely handoffs from one sector to the next and being the best student pilot I could be. Then at the appropriate time, I dialed in, as instructed by approach control, the correct four digits in the correct sequence, hit ident in the transponder and eventually found myself in the traffic pattern with regional jets!

Friday Photo: touch the sky

Flying with kids is always more fun than flying solo, and this photo is a great remind why. As Fernando Gonzales-Fisher says, "My grandson touches the window of a Mooney as if he is trying to touch the clouds. What is going through his young mind? We will never know; he will never remember. A moment I will never forget."

Know when to fold em: how to avoid tunnel vision in the cockpit

Have you ever noticed that you become less and less flexible as a flight goes on? Decisions that once would have been easy and stress-free become fraught when you're close to home. It’s a natural human instinct, but it’s one pilots need to aggressively fight.
Airline pilots

Flight directors – a fatal attraction

The very design of flight director systems concentrates all information into two needles (or V-bar) and in order to get those needles centered over the little square box, it needs intense concentration by the pilot. Normal instrument flight scan technique is degraded or disappears with the pilot sometimes oblivious to the other instruments because of the need to focus exclusively on the FD needles.

Purchase your training aircraft prior to your first flight lesson

I was seriously investigating the pursuit of my lifelong dream of becoming a pilot when I engaged a corporate pilot in conversation about learning to fly. One of the things that he spoke about in becoming a pilot was to consider first purchasing a taildragger aircraft of my own to take my flight lessons in.

Friday photo: skimming the clouds at sunset

It's one of the best views any pilot can find, and Antonio Rodriguez shares a great picture of it in this Friday Photo: skimming along the top of the clouds at sunset. He was flying a Piper Archer II to Nebraska with family when he snapped this photo, which beautifully shows the soft colors of the sun on the clouds below.

My (memorable) first flying lesson

Fifteen hundred feet isn't much altitude, but it momentarily seemed Olympian as our formation turned onto the downwind leg of our traffic pattern, with the airfield looking like a precisely detailed model on our right. Another banked turn onto base leg, then onto final approach for a low-altitude flyby. We came level at about 30 feet, roaring past the showline - I was momentarily sorry I couldn't be down there and up here simultaneously!
First flying lesson

Treating my fear of flying with… flying!

My relationship to aircraft and flying is somewhat of a paradox. On the one hand, I've been fascinated by planes, airports and flying since childhood. I've been using flight simulators for nearly 25 years, and today I'm even earning part of my money with that. On the other hand, my first real flight happened only ten years ago, and, honestly, it was a bit terrifying back then.

Friday Photo: Yosemite waterfalls

Although I've been to Yosemite a number of times I have never overflown. My friend, plane owner, and pilot Mike has never been there so we took the opportunity. Later, when I was able to better view the pictures, I found that shooting through his windows somehow gave the pictures a black and white appearance.