Welcome to Land and Hold Short, a weblog dedicated to light aircraft and general aviation. I’ll be writing both for other pilots and owners, and for aviation-curious members of the general public who’d like to escape their desks for a few minutes and come on up into the clouds.

About David Megginson

I am an instrument-rated private pilot with 350 hours in my logbook as of September 2004. That makes me a relative newbie, and certainly not someone in a position to start preaching to other pilots about how they should fly. I am also finishing my second year of aircraft ownership, flying a 1979 Piper Warrior II (a member of the Piper Cherokee PA-28 family). Fortunately, since I’m self-employed, I do get a chance to fly a lot, and I will include trip reports, airport reviews, and pictures among the postings.

Content before beauty

If this is not the ugliest weblog you’ve ever seen, then you have my pity: I cannot imagine what else you might have endured. My first goal is to get this weblog online and make it easy to update, using a homegrown hack of XSLT and make on a Linux box. I’m always going to concentrate on content before beauty, but I will try to find time to throw together a decent CSS stylesheet and make these pages a little easier to look at. Please bear with me.

Update (2004-10-18): I’ve started adding clumsy CSS styles.

About the title

The title of this weblog comes from the Land and Hold Short Operations (LAHSO) used at busy airports with intersecting runways: the control tower is allowed to use two runways at the same time as long as one of the pilots agrees to land and stop before reaching the intersection. Big jet airliners cannot usually accept these because they burn a lot of runway, so it’s the small planes — the subjects of this weblog — that usually land and hold short.

I plan to post new entries at least weekly, and more often when I have the chance.