After the tragic crash of a Pilatus PC-12 in Florida, Richard Collins reflects on flying with family. He says, “One of the reasons I became such a weather geek over the years was if I was going to fly my family in clouds, I was going to understand everything there was to know about those clouds.” Does flying with family change the way you fly?
Read how a family trip meant to prove the utility of general aviation goes wrong, and changes the way this pilot flies. He suggests you “take the long view when implementing your family-flying Grand Plan.”
You worked hard, paid a lot of money and earned your pilot’s license. Now what do you do? It’s a question that comes up more often than most pilots care to admit. Let me suggest 10 things that every pilot should do before they die. Call it a bucket list if you want, but I consider it a flight plan.
It was actually Father’s Day weekend, but this flight was all about Mom. The mission was to pick up my mother at her home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and drop her at Long Island’s MacArthur Airport in Islip, NY to see her friend who lives on Fire Island. I had the choice of flying either my family’s Cessna 172 or Beechcraft Baron.
Remember your first check ride? Remember the jitters you felt, the shaking hands, the funny feeling in the pit of your stomach? Well, I remember mine, and it was nothing to compare with a flight I had last week.
Back in February of 1958, my father and I took Leighton Collins’ first Cessna 182 back to the factory in Wichita, where it was traded for a brand new Cessna 182 Skylane. I was eight years old and the adventure was the first time my father had taken me beyond local flights, usually from Linden Airport in New Jersey. It was also a gamble for him