Flying Club or Renting? Why I Chose Both

I'm a full-time professional, a musician, a husband, a father, and a grandfather. For me, flying four to six hours a month doesn't justify owning an airplane. That left two practical options: renting and joining a flying club.
formation

Friday Photo: Evening Formation

From my seat, I could see it all come together—discipline, precision, and trust—set against the kind of sky you wish you could pause. One of the best things about flying is finding new things to learn.

What I Did During the Vietnam War—Part I

My work involved testing aircraft carrier catapults and arresting gear, both shipboard and land-based, as well as visual landing aids, ejection seats, crash testing, and some unusual projects such as ejection seats and arresting systems for helicopters. I sometimes get the impression that visitors are skeptical that anyone could have been involved in such a wide range of projects, including things they never knew existed.

Dreams Forgotten

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If aviation has become more routine than wonder, maybe it's time to go looking for those dreams again. Find a quiet place at home, a park bench, or maybe the picnic table outside your local airport. Take yourself back to the time when you looked skyward and imagined soaring like a bird. Try to remember the day before your first flight. Somewhere, there's probably a dream—or a promise—you once made to yourself.

Why Do We Still Need Five Tools to Plan One Flight?

I spent nine years planning flights in executive aviation. Sitting at a desk with three monitors, four browser tabs, two phone lines, and a stack of permit documents while a Global Express or Gulfstream IV waited on the ramp for a briefing package. My job was simple in theory: get all the information a crew needs before they push back for a twelve-hour international leg.

Committed to Land: The Hidden Risks of Single-Engine Operations in Light Twins

In addition to teaching our students to respect the POH procedures and performance numbers, we should also teach them the operational realities of everyday flying, where the perfection represented in the POH is unattainable and blind faith in the published numbers can become a trap.

Towing Gliders in a Waco UPF-7

I not only loved flying the UPF-7, but also loved sitting in it next to the grass runway between tows, with a cornfield at my back, grasshoppers and crickets singing in the grass, and listening to the exhaust ticking as it cooled, like a slowly diminishing clock. Ahh, memories. I was relaxed and at peace.
airventure

Friday Photo: Enjoying AirVenture

The skies were blue, the clouds peaceful and white. The aircraft were awesome as always. One positive about the digital world is the ability to change “film” on demand. So, a switch to black and white and some push processing in the lab, and all of a sudden, this could be the skies over a war torn land somewhere far off.

Know Your Numbers

So what’s the big deal about aircraft numbers, you ask? Well, just about everything. Let’s pull this thing apart and take a closer look at how those numbers impact you and your passengers.

I Can Hear You, But You Can’t Hear Me

We were climbing through IMC and unable to establish two-way communication. Shortly after, we broke out on top into VMC—but descending would have required going back into the cloud layer, and we still had no reliable way to transmit.

Flying the Pilatus PC-12: does it live up to the hype?

Today we tackle a unique and well-regarded airplane: the Pilatus PC-12. Does it live up to the hype as the “turbine Suburban?” Is a single engine turboprop safe? Can it really take off from short and soft runways? My short answer is yes, yes, and yes, but please read on for a much longer answer.

Podcast: The Day the Sky Went Silent with Kathleen Thompson

On this episode of the Air Facts Podcast, we’re joined by Kathleen Thompson, winner of the 2026 Richard Collins Writing Prize for Young Pilots, to discuss her powerful story “The Day the Sky Went Silent.”

Look Out Below!

The National Intercollegiate Flying Association brings together collegiate aviation programs from across the country to compete in precision flying, navigation, aircraft recognition, flight planning, and other challenging events. In this firsthand account, a Purdue University pilot shares the excitement of one of the competition's most unique events—message drop—and reflects on the friendships and flying skills that collegiate competition helped build.
circles

Friday Photo: Circles in the Sky

Despite this being January, beautiful weather still was covering our area. As the skies provided some action with cloud cover, I decided to capture some stills as opposed to video for later analysis of all of my mistakes.  I was fortunate that Mother Nature and the flight path lined up to provide an opportunity to capture some amazing colors and action from the day.

On the Dot

There are certain aviation moments along one's journey that become permanent snapshots in your mind. For me, one of those moments happened in the summer of 2022, descending toward Runway 27 at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh in our white Beechcraft Travel Air.

TFRs Suck!

If you aren’t familiar with the Bedminster TFR, it’s a Presidential one, well actually, not one but a set of them, well, a set of NOTAMs really, and those NOTAMs consist of several rings of restricted airspace, well actually, there are two rings, well, maybe more, but anyway, there’s one you can fly in and one you can play Top Gun in.

Celebrating the Frontier of Flight

As the 20th century dawned, America’s pioneering aviators discovered another frontier on the sands of Kitty Hawk—one above our heads and more endless than any ocean or continent. And many of us would follow. The frontier of air and space called forth our best.

Distractions, Casualness, and my Final Flight

by the time final flight rolled around, my 76 year old body had been aged considerably by medical misadventures. My monthly flying hours dropped off then, too, and the heart attack meant that I could no longer fly PIC. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but there were enormous adverse psychological factors at work from all the medical misadventures, exacerbated by the second medical rejection from the FAA that gave no specific reasons.

The Bug

An insect in the cockpit should be a minor distraction. Unless you're flying with Piet, a pilot whose war against creepy-crawlies would leave a Comanche full of DDT and two aviators fighting for visibility.
aspens

Friday Photo: Aspens in the Rockies

I finally got the mountain flying course on the schedule.  I booked for the first week of October, and I hit the landscape lottery.  By sheer chance, three days of flying in the heart of the Rockies coincided with the peak of colors in the Aspens.  It was my first experience flying small GA in the Rockies, and I was just stunned.
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