Every account in Fletcher McKenzie new book comes from a pilot who lived to tell it. That is the organizing idea behind 91 Lessons From The Sky: Experimental Aircraft, the latest title in his Lessons From The Sky series, out now in paperback and e-book. McKenzie spoke at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh on Tuesday, in the Vette Theater.
The 91 stories are drawn from NTSB reports and first-hand accounts, and they cover the full range of experimental risk. Bounced landings, ground loops, tailwheel handling, and carburetor icing sit alongside weather encounters and fuel exhaustion traced to faulty gauges. Others are sharper: elevator cables disconnected in the climb, weld failures on takeoff, engine failures at 100 feet, and tail-rotor belt separations. Running through many of them is the pattern every experienced builder recognizes, the accumulation of small decisions that together produce an outcome no single one of them would have caused alone.
What makes the collection relevant to this readership is its focus on the builder-pilot specifically. McKenzie identifies a blind spot particular to the person who assembled the airplane: knowing the aircraft better than anyone, and sometimes not quite well enough. It is an honest framing, and it avoids the easy lecture. The fundamentals threaded through the book are the ones that hold up on any ramp, e.g., checklist discipline and preflight inspection standards.
The title joins a nine-book series that includes 81 Lessons From The Sky: General Aviation, 72 Lessons From The Sky: Cessna 172, and separate volumes on civilian and military helicopters, U.S. military and commercial aviation, and a TOPGUN title on U.S. Navy pilots. The experimental volume is the first in the series aimed directly at the amateur-built community.
McKenzie is a private pilot and a two-time national flying competition title holder, and he produces the television program FlightPathTV. His stated mission is a familiar one in this field: help pilots learn from the mistakes of others. For a readership that builds its own aircraft and then flies them, a book assembled entirely from pilots who walked away is a straightforward proposition.
91 Lessons From The Sky: Experimental Aircraft is available now in paperback. Review copies, interviews, and images are available from the author on request.
