chateauaeronautiqu

Good Morning! We were taxiing a DC-8 cargo airplane out for takeoff on a beautiful Miami morning. I was the Flight Engineer. The Captain, Jerry, was the airline’s Chief Pilot, and our First Officer, Al, was a member of a renowned aviation family in South Florida. I was running the taxi checklist when, without warning, Al’s arms shot up over his head, both hands clenched tightly into white-knuckled fists, and began shaking vigorously. Jerry and I were both startled. Al’s sudden strange...

Hello Every One! During my five years on the DC-10, and during my time flying the Airbus A330, I flew to India many times. Loved India! Our routing from Amsterdam to India took us over Iran—about four hours of a ten-hour flight. It is a large country. The landscape below was usually brown, but on one trip, it was bizarrely blanketed in arctic white snow for the entire four-hour crossing. We normally departed Amsterdam in the morning and landed in Mumbai or New Delhi around 10 p.m. Our return...

Hello, hello, hello! This week’s Cockpit Chronicles are tales from flying my 1956 Cessna 172, N5140A. It was the spring of 2002, and I was shopping for a Cessna 172. I flew to Dallas, Texas, to visit my friend Rocky and see what I could find. Rocky had a friend named Hank who kept a 172 in a barn beside the grass runway at his North Texas home. Hank was an octogenarian and quite a character. We flew from Rocky’s grass runway to what could loosely be called Hank’s “airport.” Hank’s runway had...