Push the throttle forward, and you pop out of the gray into blinding white and endless blue. Pilots get that reminder often. The rest of us need it too.

Pilots of small planes give thunderstorms a wide berth. Accidentally flying into a brewing system is feared by many aviators and I’m no exception. But in my...

When I started training for my pilot license, I was amazed at how I felt after a flight ended. If I ever lifted off from...

“Stop staring at the instrument panel,” my flight instructor said, finger pointing to the blue stretch of sky beyond the windshield. “Everything that makes flying worth it is...

From the air, most of the lines we live between mean nothing. For one day, I dared the ones in my life to contain me.

Last Friday morning I flew the Cirrus to Charlottesville, VA to visit a buddy of mine, John Hart. John is an excellent friend and wonderful writer who’s had four books on the New York Times Bestseller List including…

Who knows why most pilots felt the urge to learn to fly? Perhaps some grew tired of staring at cloud bellies and wanted to see their tops. Maybe others vowed to…

Aviators come from all walks of life with wildly varied personalities. But one thing I’ve noticed is, they all tell great stories. Typically, the longer they’ve been flying, the grander the…

There’s an old aviation joke that gets passed down often. It usually surfaces during the required night flight that every student must take during training. Night flights are stressful in a single-engine plane…

If you read Don’t Look Back, you know I don’t spend much time fretting about the past. I’ve made enough stupid mistakes to fret over—trust me on this—but I try not to get…

I love to fly. But unlike career pilots with thousands of hours of flight time, I do it for fun and personal growth. Yet, I’m continually surprised how…

College has been a hot topic in our house. Two weeks ago, we moved TJ, our oldest, into the freshmen dorm at Elon University. He arrived well before the bulk of students so he could…

My youngest son, Cort, didn’t enjoy his first airplane ride. He was four and from the moment we took off, he kept asking…

When non-pilots see the plane I fly, they assume it carries a lot. But everything in life, love, and lift is a tradeoff. If I want to take four people on a trip with…

Passion. It sparks in radiant arcs when you discover it—or it discovers you. When you possess it, you couldn’t hide its warm glow if you tried. Passion spills beyond the edges of your physical form to…

Flaps, one notch. Mixture, rich. Sky, clear. Throttle, full. Brakes, released. The plane clings to the ground for an instant, Newton and one of his pesky laws stunts your…

Sometimes help not only comes when you least expect it, it also arrives in the most unlikely of forms. At least that was my experience three weeks ago when…

I was a father of young boys, halfway through flight training, and ready to quit. So I asked for a sign. What came back was a rake handle to the face.

Someone once asked me if my airplane had a rearview mirror. While it might be useful for keeping an eye on the kids in the back seats, there’s…

For those that read Weather or Not, you know I planned to fly myself to Atlanta for the weekend. The universe apparently had another idea for me since a wicked line of thunderstorms barreled through the…