Pia Bergqvist

The United States military is continuing its quest for a greener aircraft fleet and the Navy has now completed the first biofuel flight in an unmanned helicopter – an MQ-8B Fire Scout. Powered by a blend of JP-5 aviation fuel and a plant-based fuel, the helicopter took off from the Naval Air Station Patuxent River’s […]

NASA handed over a check for $1.35 million, the largest prize in NASA’s history, to Pipistrel-USA.com‘s team leader Jack Langelaan in a ceremony at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, on Monday, Oct. 3. The team’s four-seat Taurus G4 won the CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency) Green Flight Challenge, a NASA Centennial Challenge […]

During my 12-year flying career, I’ve had one engine failure. I was lucky. It happened during a takeoff in my Cessna 170, and thankfully the engine quit immediately after I applied full power on the runway. I was able to use what forward momentum I had achieved to roll onto the hard surface area between […]

Does it make sense to do primary training in a tailwheel airplane? (September 2011) Rich Stowell has been instructing full time since 1987. He has logged 32,000 spins, 23,000 landings and 8,300 hours of tailwheel time. Stowell was the 2006 FAA National Flight Instructor of the Year and is a seven-time NAFI Master Flight Instructor […]

Airguide Publications has partnered with Zaon Flight Systems to add a traffic alert feature as part of its recently released Flight Guide iEFB v4.1. By attaching Zaon’s PCAS XRX unit to the Flight Guide Fly-Wi GPS unit, you can get TCAS-like traffic alerts overlaid on the moving map display. The Zaon unit interrogates an area […]

There has been a lot of talk this year about student retention and what flight schools can do to inspire their customers to keep flying. I think one of the most important aspects of this issue is the student-instructor relationship. Learning to fly is a very intimate experience requiring many hours in close quarters. In […]

As we all learned in Flight School 101, airspeed indication is a measurement of the difference between ram air and static air. Since the pitot tube points right into the relative wind, taking in the ram air, it is also exposed to any debris in the air that you’re flying through. It’s not entirely uncommon […]

Cirrus Aircraft has delivered its 5,000th airplane, and if you ever have a chance to see it, you’ll know immediately what it is you’re looking at. The Cirrus SR22 – N5000J – has a unique yellow-and-gray paint scheme with shiny black-and-white accents. Its tail is adorned with a large numeral 5 and the word “thousand.” […]

Friday marked the 100th anniversary of the first U.S. mail flight, which took place on Sept. 23, 1911, when Earl Ovington took off from Long Island, New York, in a Bleriot monoplane, carrying about 15 pounds of letters. He flew to the Mineola post office, about 10 miles away, where his cargo continued to its […]

After having experienced the Reno Air Races once in 2003, I was thrilled to return to the show this year. The weather forecast for the races looked good and the lineup of race airplanes was as exciting as ever. I took off IFR into a 1,200-foot ceiling on Thursday morning in a 172RG that I […]