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Note to Allegiant: Emergency Landings Are Not the Problem

January 28, 2016, 9:42 am
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Recently a friend asked me what airlines were the safest to fly. I get asked that question all the time. I find the question challenging in part because of the chasm between risk and perceived risk. 

For example, most air travelers will admit to some anxiety about the safety of their flight, but few worry much about the taxi in which they are speeding to the airport. Travelers are also treated to end-of-the-year news reports about the world’s most dangerous airlines based on fatalities. That’s a false relationship as I’ve reported before.

Sometimes, however, it is obvious what airlines to avoid. I was reminded of that today when I read the latest in the ongoing saga of America’s low cost carrier Allegiant. According to William Levesque in the Tampa Bay Times, a group of investors in the airline are calling for Allegiant to create a special safety committee after a number of emergency landings and maintenance problems that have plagued the airline.


Evacuation photo from passenger Bryan Dougherty
Let’s be clear, emergency landings are not the problem, they are a symptom. One does not want airlines to put pressure on pilots to avoid them. That seems to have happened in the case of Capt. Jason Kinzer, who was fired by Allegiant after an emergency landing at St. Pete Clearwater International Airport in June 2015.

Kinzer had smoke in the cabin and a report from the airport fire department of smoke from the engine that did not dissipate in the cabin even after the engine was shut down. He opted to evacuate the 141 people on board the MD-80 via the door slides and in the process two people were injured.

According to an interview and copy of the termination letter Capt. Kinzer gave to ABC News, Allegiant found the evacuation unwarranted and said that he failed to preserve the company assets. Emergency evacuations can be expensive. The public relations hit is equally costly.

Fargo had a TFR for Blue Angels show rehearsal
One month later, the crew on Allegiant Flight 426 declared a fuel emergency while trying to land at Fargo’s Hector International Airport after a flying from its home airport in Las Vegas. The Fargo runway was temporarily closed for a Blue Angel air show rehearsal, something Allegiant and every other operator had been informed of for months.

In his story, Levesque reported it as the “strangest in a string of emergency landings” but it got even more bizarre when news broke that the pilots in command of the flight were Allegiant’s vice president of operations and its director of flight safety.

An unidentified Allegiant pilot told the Las Vegas Review’s, Richard Velotta, that one of the two management pilots had been an advocate for flights “operating with minimal fuel reserves.”

An Allegiant 757 in Honolulu
I’m no advocate of pilot bashing. Surely many things played a role in Flight 426 from its fuel load to its delay on departure to the lack of knowledge of the temporary flight restriction by the pilots or the dispatch office.

Last summer, while all this news was breaking, I received a call from a mechanic who had observed an engine replacement on an Allegiant airplane that had been stranded at a remote airport after the engine failed on takeoff. The replacement was tagged as inspected, and was ostensibly ready to be put on the MD-80 but when he saw it, my contact was flabbergasted by its condition.

“It looked as if it had been sitting in a field,” he said. When mechanics began the work, major parts were missing. “Everything about that engine change was just sketchy,” my source told me. “I completely appreciate that different companies do things different ways and level of quality is not always going to be synchronous, but it was a shit show.”

By all those surveys that rank airline safety by number of fatalities, Allegiant looks good. Since its start in 1998, it has not had a fatal accident.

But the markers for disaster are not to be found in accidents so much as in incidents and in the way an airline handles them. Are pilots second-guessed? Are safety margins squeezed? Is getting by considered good enough?

When the answers to those questions are yes, my friend, buy a ticket on other airline. 

Note: A reader of my blog reminds me of this story which appeared in the Tampa Bay Times earlier this month, also written by reporter William Levesque. 
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FAA Funding Collides With ATC Overhaul and Airplane Fire Threats

February 11, 2016, 10:30 am
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The public has sporadic interest in air travel news; seat size and ticket prices get attention, as do stories of badly-behaving flight attendants. But two issues being debated in Washington deserve some thought for their significance as safety issues with wide-reaching impact. 


On Wednesday, the Federal Aviation Administration issued yet another warning about the danger of carrying lithium ion batteries on airplanes. This was ostensibly timed to coordinate with Florida Senator Bill Nelson's new proposed legislation to ban shipping lithium ion batteries in bulk as cargo on passenger flights.

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board have been warning for years that lithium ion batteries harbor a trifecta of threats;

  • they are a source of ignition,
  • they provide their own fire fuel
  • they can create explosions as well as producing toxic gases


“If FAA testing has found that fires or explosions caused by lithium-ion batteries can lead to a catastrophic loss of an airplane, then why on earth would anyone want to prohibit safety regulators from banning large shipments of these batteries on passenger airliners?” the senator said in a press release accompanying his proposal.

In fact, that Nelson’s bill is an attempt to bust through precisely that; a legislative ban on what the FAA can do to ensure passenger flights are not brought down by lithium ion battery fires as several cargo flights have been.  (It is a subject for another day why we care more about passenger flights than cargo flights that can just as easily crash into residential neighborhoods, as El Al Flight 1862 did in Amsterdam in 1992.) 

In 2012, U.S. lawmakers acted to prevent the FAA from taking any action more restrictive than what International Civil Aviation Organization does.  Since at this point ICAO deals with lithium metal (non rechargable) but not lithium ion batteries, (the kind in all your electronic gadgets). The effect is that FAA’s attempts to go farther to prevent a battery-initiated disaster have been thwarted. If it sounds incredible, that’s because it is.

So far airline attempts to deal with the threat have been piecemeal. Just in time for the holiday gift-giving season many airlines at the urging of the International Air Transport Association, prohibited travelers from carrying hoverboards and their large lithium ion batteries onto planes, a decision that caused the actor Russell Crowe to tweet his outrage when he and his children could not board a Virgin Australia flight six weeks ago.

Still, when the federal bureaucrats get active to fix a threat and lawmakers obstruct, one can only shake one’s head in bewilderment.

It gives me little confidence in the outcome of the second subject being discussed in Washington, the privatization of the nation’s air traffic control system.

This is a hugely complex subject with long-reaching consequences I won't pretend to suggest I can foresee. Though the public debate ought to boil down to this question, “Who can better handle safely separating airplanes with the emerging 21st Century technology?” 

Instead all parties are talking about who will own the infrastructure and how will it affect the fees airlines and private aviators pay. Airlines 4 America, a national trade association that, not surprisingly, is a proponent of business sees switching air traffic control from the government to a not-for-profit company not yet identified, as all upside. So does the controller's union, National Air Traffic Controllers Association.  Delta Air Lines and Air Line Pilots Association oppose it, as does the business aviation community. 

Concerns about the FAA's inability to oversee and implement new airspace technology, and a shortage of trained controllers are long standing problems. Still, I find it hard to imagine that a private company governed by a board of industry insiders is going to be any swifter off the mark to deal with these challenges. In fact, it seems distancing this essential service from the accountability of the FAA could worsen the situation. 

As I waffle, I am certain of one thing, rough air is ahead and we’ll all need to pay attention to successfully navigate through it. 




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Nick Tramontano; An Aviator's Legacy of Kindness

February 12, 2016, 12:19 pm
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Consider this quote from Irish aviation executive Willie Walsh talking about the boss of a competing airline, Virgin's Richard Branson. "I don't like him, I don't admire him, I don't buy his bullshit." Or consider Michael O'Leary of Ireland's Ryanair, "I don't give a shit if no one likes me. I'm not a cloud bunny or an aerosexual. I don't like aeroplanes. I never wanted to be a pilot like those other platoons of goons who populate the airline industry."

The world of aviation is full of arrogant, combative individuals who may be providing a service to a world growing ever more reliant on air travel. But they are at the same time helping the industry’s descent to ever-lower levels of respect.

Then consider Nick Tramontano, who, along with his long-time friend, retired Sikorsky president Jeffrey Pino, died in a crash on Feb 5th in Arizona. He was a class act.

Called the “Mayor” of Connecticut’s Oxford Waterbury Airport by the airport’s actual manager, Matthew Kelly, no one has anything but nice things to say about Nick.

“He was wonderful,” Kelly told me. “You always left a conversation with him, with a smile.”


I met Tramontano last summer while working on my book, The Crash Detectives which will be published by Penguin in September. I had a theory related the crash in Northern Rhodesia that killed UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold and 15 others. The accident has been the subject of many investigations since 1961 and remains clouded in uncertainty. I wanted to suss out whether a mechanical malfunction on the DC-6 might have played a role.

“Talk to Nick Tramontano”, more than one person advised me. “He is such a wealth of knowledge” pilot and plane builder David Paqua told me.

And so I did.

It was late August and what was supposed to be an hour interview turned into a half a day. We toured the airport and a crawled around inside the DC-3 he maintains for Tradewinds Aviation. We had lunch and the interview morphed into the beginning of a friendship.

During our time together, two teens came into the hangar where Nick keeps his beautiful silver Twin Beech. Garrett Fleishman, then 16 and a student pilot wanted to show the plane to his younger brother, Zach. Then he asked to go to another hanger to show Zach something else.

“I would go play with you,” Nick told the two after tossing them the keys, “but we got business here.”

I had no doubt then that the 73-year old would have eagerly spent the day with the kids and enjoyed it as if he too were just starting a life in aviation. In fact, Tramontano had a half century both flying planes and fixing them.

“Anything you wanted to know about war bird aircraft and radial engines, he was a master at the radial engine,” Paqua said.

Tramontano started as a mechanic, his friend and former co-worker Ken Kahn told me, but in 1967 became a pilot. Tramontano and Kahn worked together at Seaboard Airlines, now a part of Fed Ex. “Everybody gets experience but not everybody gets good judgment. He had good judgment about operating an airplane,” Kahn said.

Photo of Pino's P-51 with permission by Curtis Fowles 
Last Friday night, Garrett’s phone rang as his boss at Tradewinds called with the news that Nick and Pino had been killed in the crash of the P-51 Big Beautiful Doll in Arizona.

“I was in shock I didn’t believe it at first,” Garrett said.

A few weeks earlier he and Nick had flown to Florida in a 1948 Cessna tail dragger. “It’s slower than a car,” Garrett told me. It was one of many flights they’d made together in many different aircraft. The two had lots of time to talk.

“He would say, ‘Don’t do this, I’ve lost friends, don’t do that’.” If it sounds in the telling that the older pilot was lecturing the younger, that’s not how Garrett heard it. He welcomed the advice telling me, “I learned more visiting his hangar in an hour than in 2 months at school.”

On September 20, 2015, Garrett’s 17th birthday, he got his private pilot’s license; credit going to his instructors at the Oxford Flying Club. But outside of his official lessons, there was Tramontano.

“I’ve learned a lot of things,” Garrett said, including how big is the responsibility of aviators. “You can impact or hurt a lot of people,” he told me. “It’s a big deal.”

In an email, Fed Ex pilot Ed Ruhl, another friend of Tramontano wrote that with his death, “There’s a hole in the world.”  To those who knew him that’s undeniably true. 

But if you look at Garrett Fleishman, you will see Nick’s contribution was bigger than any hole left with his passing because he set such a good example for the next generation. At a time when it is sorely needed, Nick Tramontano left a legacy of  responsibility, civility and kindness. 
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Quest For More From CNN From MH-370

March 5, 2016, 6:22 pm
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Full disclosure: The Crash Detectives, my own book on the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370, will be published by Penguin in September. This may have colored my perception of Richard Quest's new book, The Vanishing of Flight 370. Then again, maybe it really is a rehash of CNN's original undisciplined coverage.

Quest, CNN's business correspondent, is well known for his out-sized personality and his "say anything" interview style. But in the book he has produced for Penguin Berkley and timed to the second anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia 370, all his insouciant charm is gone. Without that, Quest's demonstrated ego wears thin long before the reader gets to the book's vanity snapshots section.



The photo inset features Quest with Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak, (2 of these) Quest with Malaysia defense minister Hishammuddin Hussein, Quest with Malaysia's aviation boss Dato Sri Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, Quest with MH-370 passenger advocate Sarah Bajc, Quest with fellow CNN staffers; Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo and best of all Quest with MH-370 pilot Fariq Hamid. 

Wait a minute, Quest with Fariq Hamid?

Why yes. The most interesting tidbit in Quest's retelling of the MH-370 story and CNN's coverage of it is that sixteen days before the Boeing 777 inexplicably flew into the South Indian Ocean, Quest and a CNN camera crew were in the cockpit of a Malaysia Airlines flight from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur. Astonishingly, the pilot in the right seat on that flight was 27-year old Fariq Hamid, who very shortly would be the first officer of MH-370. 

No one knew of course what was soon in store for poor Fariq and the 238 others on MH-370, but credit Quest with recognizing that allowing a television crew into the cockpit might have not have been the best idea considering that young Fariq was still receiving initial operating experience on the triple 7.

Fariq with Quest in a cell phone selfie. Photo courtesy Richard Quest
"I wanted the footage badly, but I also knew I didn't want an incident on my hands," Quest writes. "So I gingerly asked Captain Liu whether it was wise for us to be putting Hamid under more stress by filming his landing the plane. My hope was that Liu would decide to land the aircraft himself."

But it was no deal. Fariq did the landing at Kuala Lumpur. Quest got his footage and afterwards the reporter posed with Fariq for a selfie on the pilot's cell phone.

This is a weird coincidence of which I was not aware until Quest's book arrived on my doorstep last month, I probably missed it because when I was in Malaysia working for ABC News, I rarely saw CNN's coverage.

What I do know about how CNN handled the disappearance of MH-370 comes mostly from the eye-rolling of fellow journalists and aviation geeks.

If I missed anything else significant, Quest's book presents a near play-by-play of the action at the Atlanta-based news network.

What many saw as CNN's non-stop, talking-head-heavy obsession with every non-development was "the antithesis of the era of prepackaged, formulaic news coverage," according to Quest. "It was why twenty-four-hour news had been invented," he writes. "Here the viewer was being invited to see firsthand the process by which raw news is analyzed and brought into perspective."

The plane that flew as MH-370 Photo by Jay Davis
Right about now, you are wondering why I meandered from the ostensible subject of the book - MH-370 - to bring up CNN's coverage.  Well, that's because the author takes a similarly bifurcated path. While the book purports to be about the disappearance of the plane, "The True Story of the Hunt for the Missing Malaysian Plane" is the subtitle, Quest's book is equal parts a retelling of what we've learned over the past two years and a justification of the way CNN went all out to "own the story."

Unfortunately for the reader, Quest does not present anything new or make a convincing argument why it is a good thing for a news network to abandon coverage of all other world events to pay obsessive attention to just one.

So Quest's book disappoints on a number of levels, but one slip up is most telling, especially coming from a reporter as well-versed in the aviation industry as Quest unarguably is.

Before MH-370, Quest claims "No commercial plane that had ever crashed did so without leaving a trace."

Pan Am's Hawaii Clipper before it mysteriously disappeared in July 1938 Univ of Miami photo
In fact, over the past century, a number of flights have vanished never to be seen again. There's the loss of the Hawaii Clipper in July 1938 and the mysterious disappearance of an Indonesian commuter flight in 1995 and a half a dozen others in between.

Any book that professes to be the "true story," ought not to include such a demonstrably false statement especially when the author has the reporting strength of an entire news network on which he can rely.

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United Makes Peace by Reinstating Fired Crew, Qatar Not So Much

March 11, 2016, 7:51 am
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Two stories with big consequences for the participants and lessons for the rest of us were in the news this week. After years of fighting their firing for expressing concern about the security of their aircraft, 13 United flight attendants have been reinstated.

You may recall from a previous post on my blog, that in the summer of 2014, the cabin crew on a flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong, grew concerned about disturbing graffiti on the tail of their Boeing 747. Drawn in the grease were two faces and the words "bye bye".

The airlines operations staff dismissed the drawing as a benign prank - not a security issue and tried to dispatch the plane. The cabin crew was less sanguine. Malaysia Flight 370 had disappeared without a trace just four months earlier justifying - to them at least - their edginess.


The impasse came from the flight attendants' request that the jumbo jet be searched along with all the baggage and the passengers and the manager's order that they shut up and fly the trip. Things spiraled from bad to worse until the flight attendants were shown the door for insubordination.

Now, after nearly two years, a Federal whistle blower lawsuit and what I'm assuming are some sizable legal bills on both sides, the airline has agreed to reinstate the cabin staff. 

"We welcome these flight attendants back to our team," said the airline's senior executive in charge of inflight services, Sam Risoli. And even though it didn't seem that way when the incident first happened, Risoli made the point in a press release that its employees were encouraged to "raise concerns in good faith about the safety or security of our operations."

This story was big at the time. General news interest focused on the odd decision to chasten workers for concerns about a flight's safety.

Within the industry, the airline's mishandling of basic crew communication raised eyebrows and questions about the effectiveness of crew resource management and United's commitment to a safety management system in which everyone contributes. One must take the airline at its word that the case of the fired flight attendants has prompted some soul searching. 

The whistle blower protections under which the workers sued have at the center the best interests of the passenger operations, they are "essential" according to David Marshall, the lawyer representing the flight attendants. 

The B-777 that hit runway lights at Miami International in 2015
Making peace and moving on as they seem to have done at United is unlikely to happen at Qatar, however. The pilots recently fired by the Gulf carrier's bombastic boss, Akbar al Baker, can't count on American employment protections or, it would seem, the industry's well-established "just culture" to help them get their jobs back.  

Last fall, the flight crew of a Boeing 777 departing Miami International Airport entered the runway at an intersection 3,200 feet ahead of where they ought to be and started the takeoff roll. It was not until the pilots saw the end of the runway approaching too soon that they realized something was wrong. The captain opted to take off and was unaware that the aircraft actually hit the lights indicating the runway end. Damage to the plane's underside told the story when the flight landed in Doha. 
Damage to the plane and to the runway light. DCAA photo

You can read the preliminary report from Qatar's Civil Aviation Authority here, to see all the factors that came into play that night but of course there were many. 

What's horrifying about the case is the statement of al Baker in announcing the sacking of his pilots. 

"We will not accept any kind of lapses by pilots," he said. Al Baker must have missed the first page of the QCAA's report which states, as most civilized government aviation agencies do, that the purpose of an investigation is to prevent them in the future.  It would be inappropriate "to assign fault or blame" the report reads.

It's more than inappropriate to expect punishment to prevent errors, it is dangerous. Unintentional acts provide clues to underlying problems that go farther than a simple mistake.  This is a lesson that goes back to the days of the Comet (which you will read about in my soon-to-be-published book The Crash Detectives).

When pilots repeatedly make the same mistake, it “must be presumed to be too easily possible,” the wise writers at Aeroplane Magazine wrote back in 1953. The wise airline executive of the 21st Century surely recognizes there are lessons to be learned from errors that can be used to improve aviation safety. United just showed how it can be done. Qatar are you listening?  

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More Than Meets The Eye in Kenya Plane Spotter Arrests

March 21, 2016, 9:45 am
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Men from Manchester held by Kenya photo courtesy of The Star
There's something very strange about the news out of Nairobi in which four British men were arrested after taking photos of airplanes at the city's in-town airport.

According to a BBC report, the self-described plane spotters said they had permission to take photos of airplanes at Wilson Airport, but the sight of them with their cameras caused concern among some folk who noticed them, “from the airport bar,” and I’m quoting directly from the BBC report. 


After the men were picked up at Wilson Airport they were taken to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on the far side of the city and incarcerated there for nine days. Stephen Gibson, 59, Ian Glover, 46, Edwin Swift, 47 and Paul William, 47, will have to cough up $2,000 to get out of jail and out of the country according to the Kenya Star newspaper.

During my visit to Nairobi I roamed Wilson Airport on four occasions, once after having a lovely lunch at the colonial-era-styled East African Aero Club complete with photos of famous aviatrix Beryl Markam on the walls and aviation-themed movies playing on the lobby television. I wandered around the property including the guest houses snapping away.

Florence Wilson
It is worth noting these days while we are doing so much talking about women in aviation, that Wilson Airport, was named after Florence Wilson, a British widow and heiress who invested in an airline in the twenties with her lover, the pilot Thomas Campbell Black. 

While Campbell didn’t treat Wilson like a lady, (he left her, the story goes for Beryl Markham), even after he was gone, the business thrived. In 1939, however, the British government absorbed Ms. Wilson’s fleet along with the flying school into its Kenya Auxiliary Air Unit. In 1962, shortly before becoming the independent nation of Kenya, the airfield was renamed to honor Florence Wilson.

In February I transited through Wilson airport several times as I changed planes en route to Keyna’s famed wildlife parks; Amboseli and Maasa Mara. I took photos from inside the airport and out and from inside my airplane and out and I was far from the only one with a camera.

I recorded 5Y-IHO the DeHavilland Dash-8 and ET-AMV, the Cessna Caravan, both of which are being used by the United Nations World Food Program. 5Y-FDK the Phoenix Aviation’s King Air used by the Flying Doctor Service and the arrival of a fancy business jet from which emerged several men acting important and tailed by an entourage of what seemed to be journalists. Helicopter touch-and-gos, pilot pre flights, security screenings, I shot it all without seeing a raised eyebrow.

Kenya is justifiably cautious as it faces a terrorism threat with Somali violence on its eastern border. I don’t know what about this particular band of Brits made them more threatening to the authorities than other camera-wielding travelers. But my photos show there’s more to this story than what meets the eye.


Beautiful hangar at Wilson Airport
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Brussels Attack Should Prompt New Look at Airport Population

March 22, 2016, 8:05 am
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Damage at the airport in Brussels Via Twitter @infos140
A bomb in the departure area of Brussels Airport that killed 11 people this morning is already prompting discussion about how to better secure public areas of airports.

The news site Mashable, is quoting Brussels-based security journalist Brooks Tigner, asking, "if [attackers] are going to target public departures areas, what do we do?" 

Other airports have already answered that question. Among those that have been pro active in protecting the assembly of air travelers is Addis Ababa's Bole International Airport, which has been closed to non travelers for years.
Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa
Ticketed passengers must pass through security before even entering the terminal. Ditto for the new Terminal three in New Delhi. 

Security at Indira Gandhi International Airport is so tight, even the movement of guests at the airport hotel is restricted; as in "You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave." At least not until you are headed for your departure gate.

Not a lot of people at Terminal 3 at Indira Gandhi Airport
I wasn't wild about the diligence of the security guards at the check point when I entered Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta Airport last month, but even so, Kenyan airport authorities are making the effort by keeping all but screened travelers out of the departure areas. 

So it is possible to increase airport security by moving checkpoints to the front doors and/or restricting who can enter in the first place. But no traveler is an island. Commercial flying requires a hefty support structure that necessarily includes others who are not flying. 

And those who cannot enter the terminal must have another place to congregate. 

Waiting in line to pass through the metal detectors in Addis, I did look around at the crowd of which I was a part and wonder if we didn't make quite an attractive target.

Still, to the terrorist mind, a blast inside an airport - especially by the counter of an airline with a provocative name like "American" does pack an extra public relations wallop. 

The monitoring station at Vienna International Airport
And while all airports have sophisticated operations desks where trained professionals can monitor all parts of the airport both pre and post security, it would be particularly challenging to spot a suicide-vest-wearing or concealed-bomb-toting bad guy bent on mayhem. 

The dust has barely settled on this latest attack. But one thing should already be evident. Because of the millions of people who fly every single day, aviation has a bull's eye on its back. It hasn't been business as usual for more than a decade and it's even more true today.

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Come Fly With Me

April 1, 2016, 3:20 pm
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Recently I asked readers, what I should do to celebrate when Flying Lessons achieves one million page views. And while many people suggested having a cocktail or going flying (not at the same time of course) I was unknowingly, already working on the perfect celebration; taking a trip to somewhere new and on this one I want you to come along with me.

Today, April 1st, no foolin; this blog will be arriving in formation with my travel blog at my new website so this will be my last post at this url.

christinenegroni.com is beautifully designed by the mega-talented, Portland-based, Kate McMillian of Outbox Online. The site she’s built has space for photos, videos, comments, an archive of newspaper and magazine stories I’ve written and information about (and soon an excerpt from) my new book.

Your arrival checklist is simple. Click on “subscribe”, select which blog you want to receive - you can select both blogs if you wish - and you're done. You'll be notified each time I publish a new post.

As ever, your email address is safe. I won’t sell it or use it to spam you. 

If you are already receiving Flying Lessons via Feedburner or Google Groups or any other RSS feed, that may continue, then again it may not. Since I don’t want to lose you and I hope you don’t want to lose me, just click on "subscribe", okay?

Over the past few years, I’ve written 499 Flying Lessons posts and exceeded 951,000 page views. These nearly-there numbers remind me of the birth of my daughter Marian Schembari. In 1987, she arrived one-minute before 3:00 am and 1 ounce shy of 6 pounds. She’s exceeded all expectations ever since. 

With your support I have high hopes Flying Lessons will continue to soar.  See you soon at christinenegroni.com.
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FLYING LESSONS HAS MOVED

July 25, 2016, 3:34 pm
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