What Plane Should I Buy?

Thoughts on finding a good purchase candidate An extraordinary number of GA airplanes were bought and sold in 2020. I imagine this was somehow related to the pandemic, although I’m not sure exactly how. What I do know is that my company had been averaging about 10...

CRISPR

I’m in the middle of Walter Isaacson’s new book on Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna. She co-founded CRISPR which is an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. Imagine having the tools to make humans immune to viruses...

Annual Deadlock

What happens when an owner and an IA can’t agree? By Mike Busch Sam is a pilot, engineer and serial entrepreneur who lives near Washington DC. About 10 years ago, he bought a 1966 Cessna 182J Skylane that is based and maintained in nearby Maryland. It’s been a pretty...

In Like a Lion

I heard a weathercaster dig up the old “In like a lion, out like a lamb” line recently in reference to the weather in March. As I write this we don’t know if this year’s “out” will be a lamb or something more fierce. But it got me...

How Risky is Maintenance?

An FAA review of 10 years of NTSB data tries to quantify the risk. I’ve been known preach about the virtues of maintenance minimalism—a.k.a. “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”—and the risk of maintenance-induced failures—a.k.a. “MIFs.” But just how risky is...