Welcome to Geneva airport. Local pilot, Vincent (author of the PlasticPilot blog) gives us the low-down. The main concrete runway is just huge, 4'000 meters long, but also very busy. All single engine VFR have use the grass strip which runs parallely on the north-west side. The grass strip is short (520 meters LDA) and there are trees on the 05 climb-out trajectory.

After a visit to the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport last week, this week I sit on vacation on a thin spit of land barely a mile wide and some 80 miles long.  Through the years this long sand dune has been home to birds, crabs, fish, pirates, mosquitoes, shipwrecks and, tourists; some for longer periods of time than others.  But just over a century ago this out-of-the-way place became the center of the aviation universe, and, in the 20’s, one man fought the conventional thought of the time and proved his theory that took air power into the modern era.

On a three day trip to the Baltimore-Washington area this past week, I took the opportunity, upon our arrival at Washington-Dulles International Airport, to jump in the rental car, head back down to the approach end of runway 1R and visit the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

What makes us fly?  Some might say it’s the money, others would point to the travel experiences, some may tell you they like getting to know the people they fly.  For me it’s not just one thing: sure, the money can be good, I’ve been to some places around the world that I wouldn’t otherwise have seen and many of the folks who stretch out in the back of the jet are fun to be around, but to say it’s one thing is, in my opinion, missing what flying – whether as a job or for fun – is all about.

By way of introduction to my new, regular articles on ModernPilot.com, I thought I would paint a picture of my background and experience, making a living in the skies “Across the Pond.” My interest in aviation stemmed from time with my babysitter when my brother and I were around 7 or 8 years old. Gill Howie used to come to our house and entertain us (keep us from fighting one another) by bringing a pile of aviation magazines and allowing us to out the pictures and stick them in large scrapbooks. She encouraged us to label the photographs and promised that next time she would bring more magazines and we could cut out even more pictures of airliners and fast jets.