Airmanship

My first flight instructor’s words from decades ago are stuck with me: “Glide, grass, gas,” he said, and then repeated it. “Glide, grass, gas.” He was talking about engine failures, and these three little words are a nice mental checklist for what to do when the engine of a single-engine airplane stops. Glide: Fly at […]

My previous article (“Off-Field Landings,” October 2021) discussed how to minimize the risks when a worst-case scenario becomes real. Doing what you can to prevent an off-field landing remains Job One, but sometimes things don’t work out. All of a sudden, you’re on the ground, the airplane is broken and you can’t get a cell […]

With the proliferation of electronic flight bag (EFB) software running on tablets in our cockpits, it’s often easy to forget that some of the data we download every 28 days may not be correct. In fact, the charts, approach plates and airport information we use—to name just three categories—can easily be missing important material or […]

It basically doesn’t matter why you need to discard your visual landing approach and go around. It could be something as routine as another airplane or a vehicle on the runway, a poorly flown approach or configuration error, or a controller’s direction in response to something you can’t even see. But go around you shall, […]

A good landing is any landing you walk away from. A great landing is when you can use the airplane again. Who doesn’t enjoy the classics? As humorous as these sayings can be, they occasionally do contain some nuggets of wisdom. For example, I would consider Captain Sully’s landing in the Hudson River a good landing, […]

It was well after dark when we arrived over the unfamiliar rural airport. We were descending toward that green and white airport beacon, and I thought I could see the headlights of my brother-in-law’s crew-cab pickup truck in the parking lot. “Watch this,” I said to my daughter, and I clicked the push-to-talk switch seven […]

Excessive heat “kills” integrated electrical circuits, the kind found in modern avionics. Unlike many other electronic devices, avionics also may be exposed to sunlight filtered only slightly by a transparency. Combining the two sources—as when on the ground on a hot, sunny day, engine running and with all the electrical equipment active—is fairly common. While […]

Each month in the back of this magazine, we chronicle recent accidents we hope are of interest to readers. A glance at a random month’s entries likely would reveal that a substantial portion of them involve total or partial failure of a piston single’s engine. Yes, there’s selection bias involved—we typically try to highlight the […]

I was recently listening to AOPA’s podcast There I Was… during my drive to work. For those who are not aware, it’s a podcast that invites us into the cockpit of aviators as they encounter unpredictable situations, and we learn from their experience to improve our own skills and aeronautical decision-making. After all, it is a […]

There’s no question the global positioning system, GPS, has revolutionized the way everyone on the planet navigates. In little more than 25 years, the technology has become ubiquitous in automobiles, cellular phones and cameras, to name only a few devices. Oh, and aircraft surveillance/navigation systems, too, which may be its most critical application. None of […]