The man who was killed Sunday on the Schuylkill Expressway had gotten out of his car. If you can get past the wreckage in a low viz or icy situation like this, I'd say get well up the road and make sure you're not blocking the access for emergency vehicles that might be coming against traffic before you even think of…

It's nice to know that those guard rails are essentially meaningless when it comes to crossover protection from big rigs.

Greatest kicker lyric for the country hit I never wrote:

I was genuinely surprised not to see a Paragon Panther amongst that collection.

Look, here's the thing. I've driven a range of AWD drive vehicles over the last 20 years, and never once had winter tires or gotten stuck on ice or in snow where the weight of the car was firmly on the ground. Keep good meat on your all seasons and use a feather touch on the throttle and you'll be able to get to the…

This is a kind of unique story about one family's experience of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It kind of drives home how most people had to make do in terms of communication, and that while it was possible to get a message halfway around the world more or less instantly, the bandwidth was so tiny that matters of…

I'm with you. I'd like this truck with another 30k miles and a bed that showed it hauled a few dozen loads of plywood and mulch in its time.

Nothing compared to most of these, but mine has to be hitting a full-sized truck fire extinguisher on rush hour traffic on Route 128 outside Boston. I was headed home after spending a weekend at a friend's place in Quincy when the traffic ahead of me started swerving in every imaginable direction. I saw it coming well…

Isn't Mid Continental where Beechcraft and Cessna have manufacturing facilities?

Here you go:

Not really. Even fast boats like this are relatively fragile and built to take sustained and surging or pulsing pressure. A big shock like this would probably deform the hull enough to tear loose the interior cabinetwork and knock the engines and other machinery off their mounts. Not to mention that the passengers are…

Years ago a buddy and I were having a couple of beers while a couple of rough looking characters at the other end of the bar had a heated discussion. Above the din of the bar, one was heard shouting at the other: "Man, shut the fuck up. You ain't even a saucier."

The Boeing B-47 was a pretty important stepping stone into the jet age for civil aviation. From the first U.S. long-range jet nuclear bomber came the DNA of almost every passenger jet ever produced.

The first to use terrain-following radar, afterburner engines and variable-sweep wings. Also, its fuel dump meant plane-b-que!

Basically the same reason a tornado is visible even before it starts sucking up the world. The wings and other control surfaces create air vorticies. Low pressure inside a vortex causes water vapor to condense into visible droplets.

That's an amazing photo of a mind-bending aircraft. There was a great article about that firefighting operation in Air&Space Smithsonian Magazine probably 20 years ago. Their demise was likely due in no small part to the fact that they were making a lot of parts from scratch to keep them in the air.

I used to pretend I was a rally driver in my Camry AllTrac on the logging roads of Bald Eagle State Forest in Pennsylvania. I'd go blow off some steam when I was in college, driving 40 or 50 miles on gravel, trying to get the back end out on turns. I could have very easily gone down a slope where no one would have…

I drove a rental Sunfire for entirely too long while my Impreza RS was in the shop for the requisite Subaru 2.5L head gasket job. I called it the Pontiac Carfire.

By the way, I'm surprised you didn't mention trolley tracks as one of Philadelphia's indigenous hazards.

Pennsylvania is not a bad state for driving a fun car. The problem is you need to get away from Philly's suburban sprawl, which unfortunately spans about a 75-mile radius.