Along the way during 30 years of flying oddball and out of the ordinary aircraft, there have been a few times when the prospect of writing a humorous or adventurous story arose out of one flight or another. Most of the time it was because I'd gotten myself into something so ridiculous that it was humorous. Other times it was something that was too preposterous to be taken too seriously, but there I was in the middle of it anyway.

My experiences flying exotic competition sailplanes (gliders) in the early 1980’s, plus one lonely night sleeping in the glider operations office at California City airport, with a couple of belts of whiskey as a catalyst… resulted in a handful of emotional poems being scribbled down all at once. Some interesting and difficult cross country ferry flights bringing home antique aircraft over the years became fodder for a few other stories. An engine failure on takeoff (bringing the world’s busiest general aviation airport to a standstill) was too good to pass up, so another story was written. Hopefully there will be more adventures and more stories in the future, but for now here are a few.

(Note: For the purposes of any FAA or NTSB enforcement activities, these stories are all completely fictitious, and any alleged witnesses to any of the fictitious events reported in these imaginary stories have vanished into black SUV’s escorted by people with earphones)