Going Direct: Envy

So, what does this have to do with airplanes? Plenty.

I received an e-mail the other day from a reader who was very angry with Dick Karl and with our publishing his columns. He wasn’t mad because Dick is a jerk or because he writes badly — neither is true; he’s a hell of a nice guy and a terrific writer. The e-mail author’s beef was that Dick has a Cheyenne and, moreover, we’re insensitive enough to let him write about it. The author’s point was this: If we write about expensive airplanes, people who don’t have such nice airplanes will feel left out.

It takes little reflection to detect the problem with this notion. If we don’t write about airplanes that some of our readers can’t afford, well, that leaves us with exactly no airplanes to write about. Is there a dividing line somewhere between what we can write about and what we can’t? If so, does this presumed bright line lie just south of Dick’s vintage turboprop?

Truth is, there is no bright line. In the past we’ve gotten similar e-mails from readers who were just as unhappy with former editor-in-chief Mac McClellan owning a Baron or with me flying a Cirrus. (For the record, I’m a one-eighth-share leaseholder in an SR22, hardly the stuff of top hats and diamond-studded canes.) There are always going to be a few have-nots who are mad as hell at the haves.

We should never forget how lucky we are that we get to fly at all. I don’t know about you, but when I see people flying something even nicer, I’m happy as all get-out for them.

In case you were wondering, the photo here is of the Cherokee Six in which I was a partner a few years back on the ramp at Grand Junction, Colorado, next to a gorgeous Hawker 800. We’d both just arrived at the airport. My trip from Austin, Texas, out to Grand Junction was fantastic, affording me up-close-and-personal views of the high country that you can get only while flying in a small airplane. Still, the trip took me around eight hours from block to block, including 6.5 hours on the Hobbs meter, not counting a needed stop for fuel in New Mexico along the way. It was a long day. In the Hawker, by contrast, the trip would have been slightly less than two hours nonstop, and would have included a potty, Wi-Fi and refreshment center.

As I stood there on the ramp looking at those two very different airplanes, I didn’t once wish the Hawker were mine. After all, I’d just had a fabulous trip. I was, instead, happy that our community has room for such different kinds of airplanes and such different kinds of pilots and owners with such different kinds of budgets.

One thing that we all need to remember is that aviation is a very small world. Across the United States more boats get sold in a week than airplanes get sold in a year. Aviation is also a very diverse community, both economically and culturally. This means that it’s critical that we stick together, even though we’re very different from each other.

Much of the infrastructure we have in the United States, from the National Airspace System to fuel distribution to FBOs far and wide, is based on the fact that together we have a great deal more clout than we could ever hope to have separately.

Owners of Cherokee Sixes and Hawkers would be smart to keep that in mind.

Welcome, Stephen and Pia
As many of you already know, during the past couple of months we've hired two senior editors, Stephen Pope and Pia Bergqvist. Even before the big changes on the masthead last fall, we were in need of help with reporting on the many and varied kinds of flying we cover at this magazine, and now we have it.

An award-winning aviation writer, Stephen comes to our magazine after 15 years at Aviation International News, where he served as editor of Business Jet Traveler and covered just about every segment of the industry. Like me, he focused on avionics, writing about the revolutionary advances in electronics that we have been witness to during the past decade and a half. He also wrote a great deal about helicopters and business jet travel. While at AIN, Stephen won three prestigious Gold Wing journalism awards, including last year’s award for his story on business aviation’s efforts at helping with the Haiti relief effort.

While Steve spent much of his time at AIN writing about business aviation, like the rest of us, he is at heart a pilot. As a teenager, Steve earned his private certificate in a J-3 Cub flying off of a grass strip in central New Jersey and went on to earn an instrument rating. Like so many of us who have written for Flying over the years, and like so many of us in general aviation, Steve comes from a flying family. At 74 years of age, Steve’s father still makes his living in one of the most demanding aviation jobs in the world, flying a medevac helicopter. What brought Stephen to Flying? Easy. It was the lure of flying and the chance to report on the kinds of airplanes and products so many of us use in our everyday flying lives.

Pia is, likewise, well-known in the aviation industry. After graduating from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University with a Bachelor of Science in professional aeronautics, she worked in several different aviation jobs, from sales to media relations to product management. The unifying factor was that each of these jobs involved flying, writing about flying, or both.

Before coming to our magazine, Pia worked for Cessna, first in media relations and later as a Corvalis product expert. In her role in communications at Cessna, Pia worked with the heaviest hitters in the industry, covering the breadth of the market from light singles through near-supersonic bizjets. As a Corvalis expert, she flew 350s and 400s around the country in support of Cessna’s sales efforts, getting extensive experience not only in that airplane but also in the ins-and-outs of serious personal transportation flying. Before that, Pia also worked selling Liberty aircraft from her home base in southern California. She’s also served as a senior editor for Plane & Pilot magazine, where she wrote feature stories about all facets of general aviation, edited the monthly news section and contributed to the Web site.

Pia’s first job after getting her degree was as a flight instructor. During that part of her life, she says, she learned some of the most important lessons a pilot could ever learn. Pia is also an instrument and multiengine instructor. She has nearly 3,000 hours’ total time and experience in dozens of different models of airplanes.

Please join me in welcoming Stephen and Pia to Flying.

Flying on the iPad
Apple's iPad ranks arguably as one of the biggest technology game changers in the past few decades. With its bright, colorful screen, light weight, great battery life, ease of use and thousands of available apps, the iPad is the tool for millions of people looking to do something really important or really fun on a convenient and relatively affordable device.

It’s also been a big favorite of pilots and of companies that develop applications for pilots.

We at Flying simply couldn't resist it, so starting back with the November issue, our storied magazine has been available on the iPad through the Apple App Store (click here).

The way this works is this. From your iPad you download the Flying app, which is free, and then when you buy an issue of Flying, it downloads onto your iPad and it's yours for good.

On the iPad, our magazine is a whole different experience, since the iPad can do all kinds of things a paper magazine simply can’t. The most obvious is that the iPad can do video, so look for bonus video coverage, like our Eclipse video in the iPad February edition of this magazine.

With the iPad we also have the opportunity to bring you more pages without having to print and ship those pages. So you get more content. Photographs look great on the iPad too, with deep, saturated colors and no fold in the middle. And if we feel like throwing in a few extra photos that we love but that wouldn’t fit in the original layout, well, we can do that too. Our February edition featured two additional photo galleries, video, two additional feature stories and all kinds of interactive whiz-bang features designed to show off the iPad’s capabilities and to make reading a little bit different than just turning pages. And this issue’s iPad edition includes exclusive content on the Mirage’s history and Sikorsky’s S-76D technological advancements, as well as an in-flight video of some Sport Pilot Remos flying.

One big difference you'll note right off the bat is that we've turned the magazine on its side. Flying on the iPad is landscape format. I was a big proponent of the change. Airplanes, after all, are landscape format, so while it makes sense to print a bound magazine standing up straight, when it comes to the iPad, the opposite is true. In landscape we can use photos larger and present video in a big window in its native format. I think you'll like the look of it.

So, in the same way that the iPad edition of the magazine is not the same as the print edition, it’s also not included in the price of your subscription. If you want the iPad edition, it’s going to cost you a few bucks: $2.99 per issue. The idea is not to give you a different way to get your magazine; it’s a different product altogether. After all, you don’t get to watch Avatar on demand on your television because you’d previously bought a ticket to the movie, as much as we’d all like that to be true. Well, all of us except maybe James Cameron.

At the same time, our print subscribers are the folks who matter most. So at some point — soon, we hope — we might be able to offer subscriptions and discounted single-issue iPad sales to our print subscribers. Apple is busy at work developing a system that will allow that to happen. We look forward to sharing news on that front before long.