Who Is This Guy, Anyway? Please Welcome, Marc Cook!

You’re probably wondering about this raspy old voice appearing on the ByDanJohnson site. Who are you and what have you done with Dan? Part of that you already know.

Dan sold this site to what was then the Flying Media Group, owned by Craig Fuller, an LSA owner himself. Since adding a bunch of marine titles from Bonnier, the overarching company is now known as Firecrown, but the aviation side is still a big part of the portfolio, including FLYING, Plane & Pilot and KITPLANES (among many others). ByDanJohnson, when it becomes Affordable Aviation, will fit like the perfect puzzle piece into the group

Speaking of KITPLANES, that’s where I come from. In fact, Dan and I have history—the good kind—as he wrote about the then-nascent LSA category for KP back when all this got started. We felt it was important to get smart about the segment since it would intersect with Experimental aircraft. How, exactly, we weren’t sure but it did seem that many existing makers of kits would jump at the chance to series-build airplanes (and they did) and that we might just get some coming the other way (not as much). In any case, even though my recent activities haven’t been so directly involved with production SLSAs, I’ve kept a keen interest in them. So taking over for Dan here represents a comfortable and exciting expansion to my duties over at KITPLANES.

Ancient History

It’s easy to get bored with the details here. Let’s just say that I can remember my first flight like it was yesterday. I was maybe 10 and a friend of the family had a straight-tail Cessna 182. I was offered a ride out of Hawthorne airport in California and never even thought to say no. Why my parents didn’t put the kibosh on it I’ll never know, but I remember watching the right main tire slip away from the runway, the wheel come to a stop and a whole new set of sensations wash over me. The flight was probably no more than 15 minutes but it set a hook big enough for a Marlin.

Many years later, I worked for a motorcycle magazine that succumbed to some early 1980s economics. I was young and dumb, so the severance package was a complete surprise. Still living at home and thinking nothing of being out of work, I allowed a long-simmering desire to fly come to the surface. I drove to the Long Beach airport, put all of my severance down on block time for rentals and found a CFI. From February to June I flew as often as I could, getting the private in a Cessna 150 then getting checked out in the mighty Cessna 172 and various Piper Cherokee models.

Head East!

With just a few hundred hours in my logbook, I applied for a job with AOPA. I’d noticed the tiny ad in the back of the magazine, and knowing about publishing assumed that it was just a formality; they’d already found a writer but had to make an effort. I sent a resume and quickly photocopied clips expecting to hear nothing in return. I went back to my life giving it not much more thought.

Until I got a call from none other than Dick Collins. Legendary as the editor of FLYING, he had recently been lured by AOPA to remake its Pilot magazine. He believed that it was important to hire young staffers who he could mold into aviation journalists. I was one of the lucky ones, accepting the offer to move to Frederick, Maryland, while still very green in the aviation realm even as I had a lot of experience in print publishing for my age. Given my rambunctiousness, I figured the job would last a year. I was there for 11.

Eventually, career opportunities led me back to motorcycling, then back to airplanes again in 2004 when I was offered the big seat at KITPLANES. I got spooked by the economic issues at the end of the decade and swiveled to playing with two wheels before being lured back in 2018. I’ve been editor in chief of KITPLANES since then, and now add this website to my list of responsibilities. 

Where To, Then?

I have the good luck to fly a lot of different small aircraft in the course of my work and have owned four—two I built and two I bought. My first kit was a Pulsar XP in the mid-1990s, the second a Glasair Aviation Sportsman in the mid-2000s. In between, as the family grew, a Beech P35 Bonanza, which taught me the value of ongoing maintenance. I paid dearly for the previous owners’ lack of it on that Bonanza, let me tell you. My current airplane, another GlaStar, was purchased already flying. I also had casual arrangements to use aircraft as diverse as a Mooney 231 and a Socata TB-21 Trinidad TC.

I don’t want to sound like the crusty old guy in the corner hangar who has seen it all—but I have seen a lot. And that makes me optimistic for the future of LSA with the coming of the MOSAIC rules package. Dan’s done a masterful job covering the project and updating you on the progress. Expanding the capabilities of LSA is a great short-term goal, making so many more airplanes available to Sport Pilots is going to do only good.

But I’m most excited by the prospect of new designs—built with MOSAIC and consensus standards in mind—coming to market. When I started, the Cessna 172 was already old. And other legacy designs, like the Mooney and Bonanza models I’m so familiar with, just can’t be cost effective based on the raw labor hours required to build them. It’s going to take new thinking, like we’ve already seen among LSAs, to build out a more affordable segment of aviation, in addition to supporting the most basic, just-for-fun flying machines in the world. 

So bear with me as I slip into this new role. Sun ‘n Fun 2024 is going to be busy for me, a great way to get up fully up to speed on this exciting segment of aviation.

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Hi Folks! In case you thought you’d seen the last of me… you have not. 😎

While Marc will take over the editor duties for this website, I plan to contribute when I discover an aircraft I am sure readers will like. I’ve come to gain a good handle on what you love so I hope to fascinate you with new developments I find.

Nonetheless, please join with me and offer a very hearty welcome to Marc Cook to the pixels of ByDanJohnson.com — becoming AffordableAviation.com. —DJ