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Test Pilot
It was not an auspicious start to the morning. Tiptoeing downstairs in the pre-dawn dark to avoid disturbing anyone, I misjudged the last step and clattered down to the landing on my butt, dumping my...
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Kpong Airfield
Morning, with a crazy cacophony of birds outside the window of the spartan room that’s my lodging here at Kpong, and I’m grappling with how to tell this story. Or even which story to tell. The problem...
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The Best Bad Breakfast in the World
I think the problem is that I’ve got a lousy imagination. I love telling stories, but I’m absolutely no good at making them up. So the only way I get new stories is by putting myself into situations...
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Down Memory Lane
I’ve got another trip coming up – another big one, that is. Devon and I will be heading off together, sans kids for ten days on the road through Israel and the West Bank. Not a vacation, unfortunately...
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Yeeeehaaaaa!
The saying around my office is “Pics, or it didn’t happen”. Sadly, I was too busy having fun, and it was only as I was swinging the P-51 around on an overhead break to land at Moffett that I realized I...
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Seattle
I swear, it’s magic. Devon and I dragged Jeremy out of bed at eight this morning and piled him and a duffle of clothes into the back of the plane. Launched north over the central valley, trying to get...
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Island Time
A man could get used to this. Lauren and Stephen have a little 15 power telescope set up on the porch, overlooking Elger Bay, west of their perch on Camano Island. The kids are all plugged into various...
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Jetsetting
Okay, it’s not that I’m trying to make people envious. It’s just that coincidences and improbabilities seem to pop up more in the Pabloverse than in most other places. Case in point: last night, Devon...
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Whew.
Okay, cutting to the chase: we won! Or, um, it won. “They”? I don’t know. It’s one of those dog show type things. But with airplanes. Let me back up a bit: You remember our Skyranger? Commonwealth...
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The Last Good Day of Summer
There’s a belief among the Stoics that the best way to appreciate anything is to put yourself in the mind that this may be the last time you’ll ever experience it: the last sunrise, the last ripe...
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Eastbound to…Daytona Beach?!?
When I was small – okay, I still do it – we used to hold our breath going through tunnels on a family car trip. My father would call out “Tunnel ahead!” and my brother and I started hyperventilating,...
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Sitting in with the Big Boys (and Girls)
The kid sitting next to me in ground school is a professional airshow pilot; Heather, next to him, flies for the Air National Guard. Mac, at the end of the row, has more B-17 time than almost anyone...
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Heavy Metal
The full moon’s up in the wrong side of the sky as I finish packing for my flight this morning – the next leg of my first of two sleep-deprived jaunts across the country this month. Ground school has...
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Aviation Dreamland
I really don’t know where to start. Do I start with pushing the throttle forward on 1400 hp of V-12 Merlin, clawing and clattering into the sky on a go-around in a glittering, mirror-polished P-51...
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Rain
We made it into Punta Gorda just ahead of the rain. The real rain, that is – we flew through a shower or two on the way down, but by the time we’d buckled down the bits on Nine-O-Nine and hauled out...
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Julie
Hey, so – remember back in January when I said I was off to Louisville, Kentucky and would explain later? Uh, yeah – never did that, did I? So let me make good on that promise now: tomorrow, at an hour...
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Quilting Capital of America
Well, long story short, I’m pleased to say we’re in Paducah. Part of it is that I’m pleased at how a near weather-induced series of airline travel misadventures managed to realign themselves in...
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Oklahoma!
When the sky opens up over eastern Oklahoma, the late afternoon sun lights up an endless string of farm ponds like small round diamonds thrown carelessly across a deep green carpet. The green stretches...
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Time Machine
It’s taken me a couple of days to realize that N616JA is not an airplane – it’s a time machine. It’s a bit smaller on the inside than the TARDIS and doesn’t make a weird grinding sound when it...
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Enchanted
Some people seem to carry a sense of place along with them, and for all the years I had any concept of Sedona, all I could say about it was that was where Amy Jo came from. Amy Jo had freckles and wore...
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