Jay Hopkins

(March 2011) AFTER MY JANUARY ARTICLE, “Deadly Fatigue,” came out, I received a message from Mark Schwartz, a retired airline pilot and Gold Seal instructor, saying that any article relating to fatigue would not be complete unless it discussed the effects that circadian rhythm has on one’s abilities to perform flight duties. I responded that […]

(February 2011) — Last month in “Deadly Fatigue,” I established that a pilot cannot win the fight against fatigue. Sooner or later fatigue will win and the pilot will fall asleep or make a mistake that he or she would never have made when well rested. However, even though we can never win this battle, […]

(January 2011) — A Beechcraft King Air returning from an emergency medical services flight descended normally toward the destination airport, but then flew past the airport and plowed into the ground about seven miles west of the airport. A student pilot returning from a business meeting with his instructor in a Cessna 182RG crashed about […]

December 2010 — It starts out as a typical flight. You complete your preflight planning and load the airplane. The engine starts quickly and everything is normal during the run-up, so you taxi onto the runway, add full power and then smoothly lift off for another enjoyable flight. Then, just as you are thinking ahead […]

Over the course of the 18 years that I have been writing for Flying, I have received a couple of indignant letters from pilots who for some reason thought an article I had written was directed at them personally. They firmly stated that they would never make the kind of mistake I had written about. […]

Driving a car is not that difficult. The instructor may have a few tense moments while teaching someone how to drive, but once you have a few miles under your tires, hopping in the car is not a stress-inducing event. Aside from a few people who are into off-road driving, most people never drive on […]

I recently received an interesting message from Kevin Recker, who is a senior engineering manager for General Dynamics in Scottsdale, Arizona. The group he leads has built space flight hardware for the Viking missions, the Apollo Program, the International Space Station and the Mars Rovers. The equipment it builds has to be right and can’t […]

Bird strikes seem to be in the news a lot recently, especially since geese brought down a US Airways Airbus 320, leading to the “miracle on the Hudson” and the article I wrote in the May 2009 issue of Flying about Things That Go Bump (Often at Night). There are other objects in the sky […]

THE WORDS “PLEASE CALL this phone number after you land” strike terror into the heart of any pilot. Sometimes the bad news comes in the form of a letter from the FAA. However it arrives, it is no fun to learn that you are being charged with an airborne deviation from the FARs. Despite some […]

When we talk about flight training safety, we usually refer to the steps an instructor can take to ensure a lesson is not marred by an incident or accident. However, there are also operational considerations that can contribute to flight training safety. I recently had a chance to talk with Dana Siewert, the director of […]