Airmanship

Editor’s Note: NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) publishes a monthly newsletter, Callback, which highlights recent reports received by the organization. The newsletter can be of limited utility to typical general aviation operators, but not the December 2020 issue, which focused on GA pilots who inadvertently found themselves flying VFR into instrument conditions. These reports […]

We all know—or should know—that an airplane’s wing stalls at its critical angle of attack. While that value varies from plane to plane and wing to wing, once that value is exceeded, the stall occurs, every time. What happens next depends on a variety of factors, including aerodynamic loading, attitude, bank angle, power and control […]

Aviation is a numbers-oriented activity. Sure; we can more or less safely operate an aircraft by disregarding some of them, but if we intend to aviate with some degree of reliability and repeatability—not to mention professionalism—we need to do it precisely, which means using some metric against which to measure our performance and the airplane’s. […]

The modern general aviation airplane has data flowing from it like never before. The flood started with digital engine monitors. Then electronic flight decks came along, capable of storing a vast array of information about each flight for later retrieval and analysis, which is especially valuable in a training environment. Now it’s ADS-B, which literally […]

If you studied aviation accident reports as much as we do, one of the many phrases you’d often see is “failure to control airspeed.” It crops up in runway overruns a lot, but primarily appears when discussing in-flight loss of control accidents, of which there are enough the probable cause has earned its own acronym: […]

By the time you read this, my Debonair should have a freshly overhauled engine holding down its nose. The story of how all that came to be is best told with a few adult beverages, but the bottom line is I will soon have a new hole in my wallet and a zero-since-major-overhual IO-520. This […]

Thinking back to my traditional aviation weather courses, I realized they didn’t address intense wind events where the agency of high wind all by itself wreaks its own special form of havoc. This year there were numerous high wind events — several haboobs in Arizona, a derecho in the Midwest, and wind-driven fires in California, […]

It’s an article of faith among seasoned pilots that many of their less-experienced peers either don’t know or don’t care enough to use the rudder properly. The frequent result, they point out, is uncoordinated flight, too often leading to the classic loss-of-control in-flight accident (LOC-I): a stall/spin, without enough altitude to recover. While that debate […]

After a while, even brand-new pilots start racking up logbook entries in a series of different aircraft. At first, we may not care, grateful for the flight time, and not pay much attention to how each aircraft has its own character. Each one also has its own story, reflected in your pilot’s logbook and those […]

There was a time when the compleat pilot needed to maintain a subscription to the FAA’s Airport/Facility Directory in addition to sectionals, instrument charts and approach plates. The electronic flight bag application running on a cellphone or tablet has all but made the paper versions of these charts obsolete, yet a pilot sometimes needed to, […]