Rhode Island is small enough that the entire state is a single operating day. From the Connecticut line at Westerly to the Massachusetts line at Woonsocket is well under an hour of driving, which means a crew can scout in the morning, set up in the afternoon and fly the same night. That is genuinely […]

Count the military airfields in San Antonio before you count the venues. Joint Base San Antonio spans Lackland with Kelly Field, Randolph to the northeast, and Fort Sam Houston, with Camp Bullis training ground sitting above the city to the north. Add San Antonio International and Stinson Municipal, and you have one of the most […]

San Francisco’s Fourth of July fireworks are, in a normal year, almost entirely invisible. The fog comes through the Golden Gate in the evening, settles over the northern waterfront, and the city spends twenty minutes listening to detonations it cannot see. Everybody knows this and the show happens anyway. It is the clearest possible illustration […]

If you have ever landed at San Diego International, you already understand the city’s central aviation fact. Jets come down the Laurel Street corridor low enough over Bankers Hill that passengers can read rooftop air conditioning units, because the runway starts almost immediately after Balboa Park and the terrain leaves no room for a shallow […]

There is a reason downtown San Jose has no skyline. Mineta San José International sits about two miles from City Hall, and its approach path runs straight over the center of the city, so building heights downtown are capped far below what a city of a million people would otherwise build. That one fact tells […]