Pia Bergqvist

This Memorial Day weekend was my most special one to date. While I didn’t celebrate it the way it was intended – in remembrance of the members of our Armed Forces who gave their lives to protect our freedom – I had a chance to visit the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills, […]

The FAA and EASA recently issued emergency airworthiness directives (EAD) for Eurocopter’s popular twin-engine helicopter – the EC 135. There are some differences between FAA’s EAD 2012-10-51 and EASA’s AD 2012-0085-E, but both were implemented because cracks have been found in the hub-shaft flange of a main rotor hub. These cracks could result in the […]

The other day I read about an accident that happend in a neighborhood in the Los Angeles, California area. As I was flying over the congested spread of the city later that day I was contemplating what my options would be should I have an engine failure. With the crowded streets, tightly packed homes and […]

Under sunny skies, Sporty’s handed out free hot dogs and announced the winner of this year’s sweepstakes airplane this weekend at its annual fly-in at the Clermont County Airport (I69) in Batavia, Ohio. Matthew Smolin from Germantown, Tennessee, won a Cessna Skycatcher LSA. Smolin was not present to accept his new airplane, but approximately 1,000 […]

An unusual display of the usefulness of general aviation airplanes occurred recently when the life of a 20-year-old boater apparently was saved by an overflying seaplane pilot. What could have ended as a tragic drowning turned into a happy day for the young boater. Max Trescott describes in his blog about the incident that the […]

One of the best lessons I ever received from my flight instructor was a lesson of disorientation. It was fairly early in my flight training. We took off from Santa Monica airport one late afternoon in the early summer. The weather was perfectly clear with light winds, but there was a thick marine layer slightly […]

Evelyn “Mama Bird” Johnson, a flight instructor and designated FAA examiner who has been credited as having accumulated more hours than any other woman to date, died on May 10 at the age of 102. Johnson was instructing and giving flight exams into her late 90s and accumulated a total of 57,635.4 hours during her […]

On the heels of Pipistrel’s four-seat Panthera announcement about a month ago, the Slovenian airplane manufacturer has introduced a new LSA – the Pipistrel Alpha Trainer. The airplane was designed specifically for the rugged training environment, with stronger landing gear and a steerable nosewheel set lower compared with Pipistrel’s previous LSA offerings to improve the […]

Dennis “Denny” Fitch, a United pilot and training check airman who was credited with helping save the lives of 184 people as United Flight 232 crashed in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989, has died at the age of 69. Fitch was a passenger on the ill-fated United flight, scheduled to fly from Denver to Chicago. […]

The FAA is making progress with the modernization of the National Airspace System through its NextGen initiative. A recently released report disclosed that 354 WAAS LPV approaches were added nationwide in 2011. As long as you have a WAAS-capable GPS receiver, you now have a lot more options when the weather is less than CAVU, […]