I was recently poking around the FAA website when I came across the Airport and Airway Trust Fund Fact Sheet for fiscal year 2016. It was like re-reading a section of the FARs after too many years. The trust fund was created in 1970 to fund aviation programs with aviation-related excise taxes on passengers, cargo, […]
Opinion
Let the airshow season begin
The 14th running of the U.S. Sport Aviation Expo vigorously launched the 2018 season of airshows. The show ran Jan. 24-27, 2018, at Sebring Regional Airport (KSEF). The central Florida airport — directly adjacent to the famous Sebring Raceway — hosts the annual event and lucked out with an opening day of gorgeous weather of […]
You think you can’t, but you can
“Oh, I could never build an airplane,” they say. And you know who they are. Almost anyone who ever overheard a homebuilder or an owner engaged in a restoration project could easily qualify. They rule out their participation before they even consider what the actual skills and requirements might be. They assume failure, then reinforce […]
Rusty Pilots Radio
It was one of those perfect Florida winter evenings. This is the weather flying dreams are made of. The air was smooth. The Cessna 152 and I didn’t experience a single bump. The sun was low off my left wing, a flaming ball of orange hanging just above the horizon. The landscape to my right […]
Droning on
I checked off a New Year’s resolution in 2017 when I successfully added Unmanned, small Aircraft System Remote Pilot to my list of pilot certifications. I am one of the more than 23,000 people who has earned that license since the FAA began issuing it in 2013. More than 23,000 licenses in only four years […]
Pilot Perspectives: Amy Hoover
By DEREK ROBERTS. If the best way to learn something is to teach it, then one would be wise to look towards Dr. Amy Hoover for flying advice. As a long-time professor and twice elected chair (2007-2015) of the Aviation Department at Central Washington University, Hoover’s 30-year career in aviation includes more than 6,000 hours […]
Alaska aircraft registration proposal is a tangled web in the making
“Oh, what a tangle web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” To be honest, I have no idea if this line from Walter Scott’s poem “Marmion” is apropos to the proposed aircraft registration discussion currently taking place in Alaska. But it was the first thing that popped into my head after reading through […]
Something’s happening
Over the course of my life I’ve had three major obsessions. In chronological order they are motorcycles, guitars, and airplanes. My dad was an avid motorcyclist, owning a Harley Davidson 125cc machine when he was but a young lad in St. Petersburg, Florida, in the late 1940s. By the time I was born, he owned […]
In appreciation of the 1%
Current estimates of the population of the United States clock in somewhere around 323 million men, women, and children. If we assume a quarter of those people are under the age of 18, as the US Census Bureau suggests, that cuts the number of adults down to fewer than 250 million men and women. Now, […]