John King

Flying is a risky activity. Many pilots like to think otherwise, but this basic truth is being officially acknowledged by the FAA. It has recruited groups of highly qualified instructors, examiners and course designers to collaboratively design an improved pilot evaluation system. The latest working group is charged with assisting in the implementation of Airman […]

There is nothing like an accident to make you think about changing your flying ways. After Martha and I had our accident, we urgently wanted to avoid another one, but we didn’t intuitively know what to do differently. We did know that somehow our attitudes about risk-taking had to change. It was pretty clear that […]

Every pilot knows that flying is an intense mixture of uncommon rewards offset with exposure to risk. After all, while airplanes provide some of the greatest pleasures in our lifetimes, they do have to reach a lethal speed just to get airborne and then fly at thousands of feet above the ground. Balancing the risk/reward […]

As you might guess, Martha and I are interested in the balance between aviation liberty and national law enforcement, and we would like to pass on some thoughts. It appears that government agencies are using their ability to monitor general aviation flights to select aircraft to intercept on landing based on what they consider to […]

General aviation has a lot of good things going for it. Airplanes have gotten more capable, and wonderful avionics improvements have come along to give us amazing inflight information and make flying much more fun. But these good things tend to be overshadowed by a particularly large dark cloud. In an increasingly risk-averse and litigious […]