Flying Staff

The world may cover almost 200 million square miles and support upwards of six billion people, over 700,000 of whom are active pilots, but it is still, in my experience, a very small place. I once literally bumped into Patty Wagstaff in a doorway of Grand Central Station, even though neither of us lives in […]

The craggy rocks of the northern California coastline stretch out in front of the Cheetah, offering sharp contrast to the dramatically swirling blue waters and white foam surf crashing violently against their sides as we make our way north. I’m busy contemplating possible reasons for the stretch of turquoise-colored water near the shoreline when Jeff’s […]

Over time, some very good things have come out of Australia-boomerangs, koala bears, and Fosters Lager, to name a few. And now there’s a new addition to that list. This past summer, Gippsland Aeronautics, based in the Latrobe Valley in southeastern Australia, received FAA certification for its GA-8 Airvan-an eight-seat, utility aircraft that was designed […]

The four-seat, four-cylinder, tricycle fixed-gear singles are in large part the basis for general aviation flying. There are a lot of them out there. They fly a big percentage of the general aviation hours, and one of them is often a first airplane with many pilots satisfied with them as the only airplane they will […]

“Watch the runway!” Pete warned as I continued on the base leg. I looked up and realized we were well past the point where I should have begun the turn to final. From where my lax attention had put us, a steeply banked turn would be required to line up on the final leg. Conscious […]

The era of the light sport aircraft is here, and pilots are working hard to understand what, if anything, it means to them. The 452-page rule that the FAA put into law last fall is a complex one, to be sure, defining a whole new category that encom-passes a number of very different types of […]

“You need to keep 80 miles an hour,” Kimberly admonishes me as we climb away from Rancho Murietta’s runway. I lean way over to the left and strain to raise myself in the seat a bit to try and peer over her shoulder at the airspeed indicator. It’s no good. I’m just not tall enough. […]

The Friday before the Presidential election I was returning from Carrollton, Ohio, where I’d been involved in an FAA Aviation Safety Program. The weather briefing had indicated relatively good weather, including warmer than normal temperatures, so icing wasn’t going to be a concern. There was a possibility of fog and some low level clouds for […]

The most valuable part of the video recording was actually the audio portion. That seems to be the consensus of many pilots when a voice recorder is compared to an image recorder, at least in a training environment; although the Navy expert testifying at the NTSB hearing argued otherwise. For certain airplanes, the Navy has […]

Somewhere beyond our Cessna 172’s windscreen, the world must still exist. Somewhere out there must be a sky, a horizon, stars, and-a few thousand feet below us-an arid landscape dotted with spinifex grass, red sand ridges and dry river beds winding their way across the vast, uninhabited stretches of the Simpson Desert. At the moment, […]