Peter Garrison One good aeroplane deserves another. The first aeroplane to cross the Atlantic was a war surplus Vickers Vimy bomber with a wingspan of 21 metres. The Spirit of St. Louis had a 14-meter wing. In 1975 I made the 3,200-kilometre trip from Gander, Newfoundland to Shannon, Ireland, byRead More →
Peter Garrison Ah, to fly like a bird – but which bird? Every afternoon my partner Nancy and I walk around Echo Park Lake. Two miles from downtown Los Angeles, Echo Park Lake is not Walden Pond. It is man-made, cement lined, shallow, and ringed by a paved walk onRead More →
Peter Garrison Forget it. You haven’t got a chance. So I muttered to myself as I closed a fascinating book called, The Enigma of the Aerofoil. The author, David Bloor, is an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh whose field is the sociology of science: how cultural and personalRead More →
Peter Garrison Why do we turn left in the pattern, when we could turn right? Thirsting for knowledge, I Googled why we drive on one side of the road rather than the other. I found a lot of obvious rubbish about quarrelsome knights and Roman charioteers. I suspect that whatRead More →
Peter Garrison How wonderful it is to have an incoming president who is, by his own admission, a leading, if not the leading, world authority on most subjects. The guidance he once tweeted regarding the excessive complexity of aeroplanes should be taken to heart by every pilot, passenger, and engineRead More →
Who should have been blamed for that 737 debacle? The cover story in the New York Times Magazine on September 22, 2018 was entitled, “What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 MAX?” The writer, William Langewiesche, son of the sainted author of Stick and Rudder, is an experienced pilot andRead More →
Peter Garrison There may still be something to say about it. A few years ago, a sightseeing flight crashed in the Swiss Alps, killing all 20 aboard. The Junkers Ju-52 was attempting to cross a 10,000-foot saddle from south to north. The wind was out of the north, gusting toRead More →
Jean-Claude was in the left seat. He was senior to me, but I was flying. We were near the Equator, where Mermoz and Guillaumet – salut, old comrades! – had once flown. But they, poor fellows, had not been at 35,000 feet! We entered the clouds at what looked likeRead More →
In 1945, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, precursor of NASA and source of much of our knowledge about practical aerodynamics, published a hefty compendium of aerofoil data, NACA Technical Report 824, which later appeared in book form under the title Theory of Wing Sections. The names of the authors,Read More →
Peter Garrison Someone once suggested that if you want to know how you would feel crossing an ocean in a single-engine aeroplane, you should just fly out to sea for a couple of hours and then turn around and come back. There’s something about being out of sight of landRead More →
