Air-Minded: Yellow Peril
“Carry a barf bag whether you think you’re prone to airsickness or not,” my instructor pilot said, “because you never know.”
Air-Minded: Eagle Versus Flanker
Hush Kit, “the alternative aviation magazine,” has published another piece of mine, this one about how F-15 Eagle pilots trained to face the threat posed by the Soviet Union’s then-new Su-27 Flanker in the late 1980s and early 90s, when I flew F-15s at Kadena Air Base in Japan.
Air-Minded: the FAA and the 737 Max
“Satisfying the needs of aviation interests” and “encouraging and developing civil aeronautics”? The conflict is baked in, part of the FAA’s DNA.
Air-Minded: First Flights
Everyone has to start somewhere. Do you remember your first airplane ride?
Air-Minded: Little Friends & Aerial Refueling
In an earlier Air-Minded post, I wrote about the early days of aerial refueling and the initial development of USAF tanker aircraft and refueling methods. This post is about the USAF jet fighters, interceptors, and attack jets that depend on those tankers to get to where they’re going and back home again.
Air-Minded: Tankers … in Spaaace!
The V-2 rocket, with its sleek cigar-shaped body, pointed nose, and swept-back fins, entered the imaginations of people the world over. It lent its iconic shape to the science fiction spaceships of the 1950s and 60s, and still has a firm grip on our dreams.
Transonic Cat Wars
I remember a huge flap at Soesterberg Air Base in the Netherlands when a new guy, one of the first of a wave of evangelical Christian officers from the Air Force Academy (a wave that continues to plague the USAF today), recorded Spielberg’s awful “1941” movie over all the alert shack’s Betamax porn tapes. Funny now, but an existential crisis at the time!
Air-Minded: PASM Photoblog XV
I was tapped yesterday, New Year’s Eve, to escort a tour group visiting Pima Air and Space Museum. They had their own Grey Line-style bus and driver, and the only way to get them from the parking lot onto the museum grounds was to drive around the back of the museum and through the restoration […]