No Regerts

Phoebe Snow’s recording of “No Regrets” is on one of my playlists, and I can’t hear the song without thinking of the Milky Way ad where the distracted tattoo artist gives her customer something to – uh, regert. Sometimes engine data will...

Errors of Distraction

When mechanics get interrupted, bad things can happen I was recently contacted by the owner of a Cessna Hawk XP (R172K)—I’ll call him “Sam”—who seemed rather shaken by a recent series of events. He told me he was a student pilot with solo flight privileges and ready...

Worst. Distribution. Ever.

They say what goes around comes around. As the new year arrived and I began my 5th year of writing these Puzzlers, I wondered what I could do to keep things interesting and informative. You the reader and I, acting as your agent scrubbing the uploaded data for good...

Breaking Good

Taking the complexity out of cylinder break-in From time to time, every piston aircraft owner faces the question of how best to break-in new cylinders. Sometimes this involves just one or two newly-replaced cylinders, other times all cylinders have been replaced...