The Seebeck Effect

The Estonian physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck died a couple of generations before the Wright Brothers demonstrated powered flight. Each December I remember to thank the brothers from Dayton for their courage and persistence that eventually led to the gift of aviation...

Hostage Situation

Don’t fall victim to an overzealous mechanic. Mark is the owner of a beautiful Cessna 185 Skywagon based in the San Francisco Bay area. Awhile back, Mark and his wife travelled to Minden, Nevada in this airplane to visit with Mark’s mother-in-law who was ill. A few...

Scramble

Some words just mean what they mean and that’s all you get. Some words give you options. Scramble can be a verb or a noun. It can mean to order fighter jets into the air immediately, or a way to cook eggs, or a disordered mixture of things. When we confuse or...

Evicted

Thoughts about being temporarily booted out of my hangar. From the time I first acquired my Cessna 310 in 1987, it has been hangered at Santa Maria Public Airport. Initially, I kept it in a large community hangar. Then in 2003, after a long wait on the airport hangar...