Stephen Pope

A Colorado sheriff’s officer recently ticketed a Blackhawk helicopter blocking one lane of a deserted road after the pilot landed in support of National Guard troops called in to rescue victims stranded by flooding. The Boulder Sheriff’s officer wrote the $150 ticket for the dubious offenses of “Parking in no parking zone” and “Parked facing […]

If you’re headed to San Marcos, Texas, next month for the dollar-a-gallon gasoline, you might consider using some of the money you saved for a weekend-long pilot proficiency forum series and hour-long session in a Redbird motion simulator. The Society of Aviation and Flight Educators (SAFE) will be holding its first ever regional Pilot Proficiency […]

It was five years ago this week that the wheels came off the global economy. As we all vividly remember, the U.S. government bailout of AIG and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 sent the Dow into a tailspin unlike anything we had seen in decades. The historic Great Recession was officially under […]

Pilots who’ve been flying for many years or decades rarely spend much of their time in the air practicing takeoffs and landings. By simply making a half dozen or so trips around the pattern in between planning those trips to distant airports we can knock off the rust the best way possible. Think about it: […]

They say very few aviation records are left to be broken, but here’s one that’s never been tried before, at least as far as we know. Wakeboarding world champion Bernhard Hinterberger recently became the first person ever to skim across the water while being towed by an airplane in flight. Hinterberger and his team accomplished […]

Boeing has delivered the final C-17 produced for the Air Force, two decades after the massive four-engine transport began military duty. Officials took delivery of the C-17 Globemaster III — the 223rd sold to the Air Force — during a ceremony attended by hundreds of workers at Boeing’s Long Beach, California, assembly plant. The factory […]

Here’s a video that’s just too good not to share. An intrepid aviator in his Super Cub lands atop a mountain in central Nevada, the oddly named Bunker Hill, at an altitude of around 11,000 feet. The approach and landing are worth a watch, but the subsequent takeoff is absolutely spectacular. After stopping for a […]

The word “cheap” sometimes carries negative connotations. It can be taken to suggest inferior quality or a poor value. But pilots who are hit with shelling out upward of $5 or even $6 a gallon for avgas, plus hundreds of dollars a month in hangar or tie-down fees and thousands more on annual inspections, insurance […]

Plenty of folks are selling portable ADS-B units these days, but none we have tried can quite match the capability of the Clarity SV product from Sagetech. The unit incorporates not one but two ADS-B receivers (a 1090 MHz receiver for seeing traffic and a 987 MHz for transmitting weather data), a WAAS GPS receiver […]

More than 100 people recently turned out for the opening of a fuel processing facility in Lafayette, Indiana, built to produce a new unleaded high-octane aviation gasoline called 100SF. Designed as a drop-in replacement for 100LL, the fuel can be safely used in GA piston airplanes, said officials from Swift Fuels LLC, based in the […]