Free Republic

After my explanation, restrained silence gave way to guffaws My Piper Cub airplane was due for an airworthiness inspection at a large airport, but since the little airplane had no radio equipment, I called the control tower and requested permission to fly in from a nearby crop duster’s strip. The controller assigned an arrival time and said that he would blink a green light if I was clear to land. What should have been a routine procedure turned out to be one of the most bizarre incidents in my flying career.

A 75-year-old aviation enthusiast whose plane strayed into restricted airspace during a presidential visit, prompting fighter jets to be scrambled, has brushed off the incident. Two F-16s intercepted Myrtle Rose's aircraft as she took to the skies over the suburbs of Chicago city on Wednesday afternoon. The widow told US media she thought the warplanes were just admiring her plane.

GETTYSBURG, Pa. (AP) Jan. 11, 2005 — A low-flying airplane so startled residents of Gettysburg in the pre-dawn hours last June that the top two floors of a six-story hotel were evacuated and borough police tried to signal the plane using flashlights. Two teenagers face a court hearing this week on charges they flew a two-seat Piper Cub airplane belonging to one of the boys' father so they could drop eggs on their high school. Adams County prosecutor Brian Sinnett called the apparent prank "one of the most bizarre cases that I've been involved in." "You hate to think what...

<p>YAKIMA, Wash. -- In 1994, the future looked bleak for the Piper Super Cub, a fabric-skinned two-seat puddle jumper with a cult-like following among pilots.</p> <p>Amid a wave of liability lawsuits that sent the entire light-plane industry into a crisis, the Cub's maker went out of business. The company that re-emerged, New Piper Aircraft Inc., said it couldn't get insurance if it resumed building the airplane that had made Piper's name synonymous with grassroots aviation since the 1930s.</p>