Editor’s Log

It’s been more than a year since FAA Administrator Steve Dickson left the agency just more than halfway through his five-year term. Then-Associate Administrator for Aviation Safety Billy Nolen became the Acting Administrator when Dickson took off, and he’s about to throw in the towel also, announcing in late April he will “depart as soon […]

If you’re reading these words in the dead-tree version of this magazine, you may have already realized it’s a bit thinner than previous issues. That’s because we’ve been forced to reduce the number of pages each month, from 32 to 24, thanks to high paper prices. We’re not the first magazine to face this reality […]

As this is written in late February 2023, U.S. aviation is taking stock of the remarkable safety record it has achieved over the last several years at the same time it’s wondering how the heck there have been two big-deal near-collisions of jet transports since the first of the year. On January 13, an American […]

I live close enough to a private runway that I walk by one end of it almost every day. So it was a few weeks ago when I encountered one of my neighbors hightailing it down the street on a single-seat ATV, pausing only long enough to share something about a crashed airplane at the far […]

While I write this, Southwest Airlines is losing a public relations battle over the thousands of canceled flights it racked up at the end of December 2022. The airline’s labor and management disagree about the underlying causes of the carrier’s inability to launch airplanes, and handle loading and unloading of luggage, but the worst aviation […]

The idea of a single pilot flying heavy jets might be gaining traction again. As online sister publication AVweb.com recently reported, “The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) filed a working paper with ICAO [the U.N.’s International Civil Aviation Organization] on Monday asking that the structure be developed for ‘a safe and globally harmonized introduction of […]

As we near the end of a year which, quite frankly, can’t over soon enough for me, it’s a good time to look back over our shoulder at what’s behind us—and what might be gaining—even as we try to focus on what’s ahead. In many quarters, 2022 was a good year. New and used aircraft […]

One summer long ago and far away, I worked as a line boy at the local airport. The job isn’t called that anymore, but it involved fueling based and transient aircraft. We had two installed pumps dispensing avgas and two trucks. One truck pumped both blue gas (100/130 octane, $0.49 a gallon) and red gas […]

A Twitter acquaintance recently posted a link to a Cessna 172N Skyhawk that was for sale. His comment had to with the Apollo 618 Loran C navigator and ADF receiver the airplane still had in it: “Why would you choose to list a Loran and an ADF in your aircraft sale description?“ It’s a good question, […]

A beam the numbers for the towered urban airport, I dropped the landing gear, confirmed I had the appropriate down-and-locked indications and waited for my Debonair to slow into the white arc. Then, as usual, I positioned the flap switch to the down position, anticipating through long experience I was extending them to their full […]