At the blistering pace of our business environment today, successful professionals need to utilize every available tool out there to stay ahead of the pack. When major deals are won and lost in minutes rather than days, an employee's time often is the most valuable resource a corporation possesses.

In today's wired marketplace, a huge number of America's most successful corporations are turning to private aircraft ownership as their secret weapon and most productive business tool.

Stop by the coffee shop at any local airport and you'll find a couple of tables filled with general aviation pilots telling hangar stories, those wonderfully famous exaggerations of yesterday's flying adventures.

Everyone at the table will be an aviation historian on some level, each with his or her own wealth of knowledge, each happy to tell you about it.

There is no disputing the fact that NASA produces the finest space imagery on the planet...or should I say...above the planet? We've all seen their work, it is sheer photographic beauty, captured by the finest equipment out there, from a vantage point only NASA's astronauts can occupy.

Over the years, NASA's astronaut photographers have always been on the "cutting edge" of photography, using the latest and greatest equipment available.

If you are in the market to purchase your own airplane, I have a valuable tip for you.

This year, I went about the task of finding a 1964 Piper Cherokee 235 that will serve me well in my business and family flying, But there is one thing that keeps popping up with airplanes built before the Summer of Love: Damage history.

As I browse the daily listings on sites like Trade-a-Plane and Controller, the one thing that always generates a second look are those magical three letters.

From the first few days when humans watched birds fly, we have been in awe of their beauty and functionality. With effortless ease, they take a few steps, flap their mighty wings, and launch skyward in a full STOL takeoff that would make a Maule seem like a DC-10 cargo ship trying to plunder its way into the sky.

While on a photo mission for my ad agency, I spent a weekend over on the Oregon coast at Lincoln City, which was getting pounded with gusts to 60 mph on it's way to a walloping with winds as high as 129 mph at Bay City.