Around the Patch

Happy new year! I hope 2024 brings you lots of new adventures and excitement as you pursue your pilot journey. Have you been working on your New Year’s resolutions? I find aviation resolutions much more satisfying—and achievable—than the usual January 1 self-promises of “gonna lose weight, gonna eat better, gonna exercise regularly.”

I love flying in the summer. The days are long, and you get that much more time to fly. The air is smooth in the morning and at dusk.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

I’ve got a fever, and the prescription is not more cowbell: It’s more taildragger.

Who are your aviation heroes? Who inspires you to push on with your flight training even though quitting sometimes seems like a very attractive option?

My mom used to say about a patch of blue sky in a broken ceiling: “If it’s big enough to darn a pair of overalls, there’ll be good weather.”

The logbook entry for November 21, 2001, reads: “Private pilot flight test/satisfactory.”

FlightAware showed my friend Marci Haas was still in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was supposed to be en route to Frederick, Maryland. She and her little dog, Bob, were to be my houseguests.

A Twitter philosopher made me laugh out loud the other day. I’ll paraphrase the tweet: “We can’t have flying cars because you [expletives] will run your tanks dry, falling out the sky, saying ‘I know my car.’”