Disney may not have intended to instigate domestic strife with the release of the trailer for its new animated feature, Planes, but I can tell that the sparks are going to fly around my house.  There they are, all those pretty little airplanes, soaring in time with the swelling chords of the music while cars and trucks with their anthropomorphized windshield-framed eyes remain solidly earth-bound. My son, Sam, writes about (ho hum) cars.  My husband Jim and middle son Sam, are auto writers, gear heads through and through. As I have complained in a previous post, neither one of them can hold a conversation outdoors without stopping mid sentence to… Read More…

Over the phone, I could hear reporters’ eyes glazing over during the latest Dreamliner teleconference when NTSB chairman, Deborah Hersman said these oh-so-unsexy words; “certification review”. Alright, the words do land with a thud, but that’s better than a crash, which is what you can get when FAA certification is not reviewed.  That is the theme of a 2006 Safety Board report examining the many ways hazards slip on to airplane designs when the certifiers aren’t paying attention. I’ve written before about the similarities between Boeing‘s “we’ll eliminate all risks” approach to using a volatile flavor of lithium ion battery in its newest plane and the “we’ll eliminate… Read More…

Stapleton Airport is now a residential community Last year at this time, I was in Addis Ababa to attend the induction of Ethiopian Airlines into the Star Alliance.  After the ceremony we went to the country’s northwest to visit the 12th Century churches of Lalibela, carved bit by bit from the mountains. This December, I spent a few days in Denver, Colorado, reporting for The New York Times on the transition of the former Stapleton Airport into an in-town residential community. It is a resurrection story of sorts- as an airport takes on an altogether different mission. A few buildings from the old airport remain, the most iconic… Read More…

At Revel, the fancy resort where I watched Atlantic City’s airshow, the weekend was dubbed, Come Fly With Me. At the bar, specially created nightcaps had enticing names like; Up, Up and Away, Howard Hughes, The Earhart, and Wright on Track. Promotional material put out by the resort said these drinks were inspired by the desire to bring back the glamor days of air travel. (That a casino operator is longing for the romance of times past didn’t come as much of a surprise; shorts and Hawaiian print shirts being the outfit of choice at most of them these days but that’s another story.) At… Read More…

Spend too much time at the big airports as I do, and its easy to slip into believing that behemoth centers of people-moving is what flying is all about. It’s not. On a beautiful, sunny summer day here in the southern hemisphere, I was reminded how wonderful it is to power down by visiting two small airfields in Chile where flying remains true to the poetic narratives of Antoine Saint Exupery, Richard Bach, Ernest K. Gann and others. Today, I spent the afternoon at the Club de Planeadores de Vitacura in Santiago, Chile – an 82 year old club for sailplane flying. While a steady… Read More…

CRAZY STUFF! Despite scarey decompressions, a you-can-not-make-this-up event on a commuter flight to New York, the inexplicable but global trend of attacking pilots with lasers, an elevation of rhetoric in politics and in aviation and some truely appalling carrying-on by air travelers who really should know better (Gerard! Alec! Leisha! what got into you?) aviation was blessed this year with many, many happy landings. SAFE FLIGHTS! Let’s start with the publication of the International Air Transport Association‘s new statistics that show commercial aviation around the world has never been safer. Statistics being slippery, I don’t normally tout this kind of thing, but Gunther Matschnigg IATA’s… Read More…

Fellow aviation geeks, don’t be too tempted to quibble over just how authentic the new television show, Pan Am is – already Mickey Maynard is tweeting that the blue of the stewardesses uniforms is the wrong shade. And I confess, when I saw the first episode, (I got to see it two weeks ago but you’ll have to wait until Sunday – Thanks Sony!) I did wonder if the set designers couldn’t do a better job on the B707 boarding bridge. Through a family connection, I was privileged to spend a few days this summer reading the memoirs of Capt. Evans, who flew for Pan… Read More…

Is there any better way to start a week of aviation-related travel than by flying in an open cockpit biplane through the canyons of Utah? That’s a rhetorical question, the answer is no. Stearman pilots, Patrick

My sons, Antonio, Sam and Joseph in 2001 Through the window of the room my three sons shared in 2001, they could lie in bed and watch airplanes on approach to New York City’s many airports. A few days after September 11, my youngest son, Joseph, then seven, asked me to close the blind. He was worried that the planes would fly through the window. It saddened me that airplanes would become a source of fear to my children but as far as aviation is concerned this is the legacy of September 11. A list of all the ways that air travel has changed since… Read More…

A sky as blue as one found in a child’s storybook greeted the New York City area after Hurricane Irene, but missing from the picture early this morning was the normally ubiquitous presence of airplanes. To people living in this region – home to three major commercial airports and four major airports for business, charter and general aviation – the last time aviation shut down to this extent was September 11, 2001. Sure, Irene had the airlines cancelling thousands of flights – running 24/7 they’ve got experience and manpower to handle it. (See this spooky shot of JFK Airport from Frank Van Haste‘s blog here.)… Read More…