The grand spectacle of a large whale breaching the surface of the sea is the stuff of great memories and great photographs, not to mention a riveting television commercial for a certain insurance company. Andrew Harcombe can claim hundreds of such sightings—but not when leaning on the railing of a tourist-filled cruise boat. Instead, Harcombe does his whale watching from the left seat of a Twin Commander. Harcombe owns Clearwater Air, an Anchorage, Alaska-based operator that specializes in collecting observational data on marine mammal populations in Arctic waters. “We support aerial research projects in the Arctic offshore environment,” Harcombe explains. That explanation underplays what Harcombe and his staff of 10 pilots flying three Twin Commanders do for their daily bread.…

Desert Air is appropriately named. The company is based in Namibia in southwest coastal Africa, a country known for its deserts and grasslands. Those colourful deserts, and the diverse wildlife that range the grasslands, attract tens of thousands of tourists each year, many of whom travel and tour by aircraft. That’s where Desert Air comes in. Desert Air was founded in March 1996 when Thys Rall received approval from the Namibian Directorate of Civil Aviation to operate a tourism and air-taxi company. Rall founded Desert Air with another pilot, a general worker, and a charter co-ordinator. The company had humble beginnings, starting with one Cessna 210 used for charter and flying safaris. A couple of months later the fleet doubled…

Brad Van Liew has led parallel lives—one on the water, one in the air. The split existence started at a young age. He grew up in aviation—his father owned and flew a Cessna 185 and a Beech Baron, and his grandfather was a barnstormer, an airmail pilot, a captain at the fledgling United Air Lines, a World War II aviator, and in Van Liew’s words, “a huge influence on my father and our involvement in aviation.” Van Liew studied real estate at the University of Southern California, but after graduating he succumbed to his “infatuation” with the notion of becoming a professional pilot. “The family rule was, if you don’t fly to professional standards, don’t fly,” Van Liew says. Rules…

Picking the right airplane requires that you apply objective, dispassionate science to the search. After all, science is all about facts because facts never lie. But here’s the problem: a just-the-facts approach can result in a bland outcome, an airplane that may check all the mission criteria boxes but falls short in one unrelated but important characteristic –– it’s ability to excite. To achieve complete scientific and emotional satisfaction with your choice of airplane, it helps to stir a little bit of art into the analysis. Abraham “Abe” Abuchowski is that artful scientist. First, the science. Abe is a biochemist. As a doctoral student at Rutgers University, he wrote a thesis on development of a new technology for protein drug…