Features

The National Transportation Safety Board has created a wish list describing its most-wanted transportation safety improvements. When it comes to aviation issues, the board specifies three areas where the FAA should take action to make flying safer.

The first, reducing runway incursions, is already on the FAAs hit list as well. Control of airplanes on the ground is problematic for the FAA because the pilots (and drivers) who cause the problems are, for the most part, oblivious to the problems theyre creating.

You can talk about signage and communications all you want, but after a look at the number of people who run red lights, weve concluded runway incursions are a cultural phenom…

Malibu loses engine on takeoff and the pilot hightails it to the runway, only to come up short on altitude and airspeed.

Tucked away in labs around the country, engineers are hard at work designing the next steps in a plan that would revolutionize transportation. The goal is one any aviation buff would admire: Substantially shift personal transportation between cities from being based on personal automobiles on highways to small aircraft.

The Small Aircraft Transportation System ties together the work of other NASA and industry programs that have aimed to improve the powerplants, weather capabilities and navigation complexities of small aircraft. The visionary goal is lofty – to create a way to reduce the cost of a new jet to a point comparable to a high-end luxury vehicle in order to reduce average door-…

Troubling words from a pilots mouth: Uh, where were we?

Driving the airplane to and from the runway is a piece of cake, right? Not for the dozens who prang something each year.

You can fly convective conditions without radar or Stormscope. Remain visual, use ground radar and cut your losses early.

Accident stats notwithstanding, gear-related mishaps account for more than half the unhappy endings to flights in retracts.

So there you are, sitting in your airplane, gazing dreamily at the new GPS, MFD, and autopilot on which youve just spent almost as much as you originally paid for the plane. Now youre faced with an IFR approach-certified GPS interconnected to a two-axis autopilot with ILS coupling and a moving map the size of a portable TV screen.

Maybe youre about to check out in a brand-new C-172 or Piper Archer with a whole pile of ultra-modern avionics, and all the FBOs other airplanes have a pair of Narco MK 12s or King KX-175s. You cant even find the on-off switch, much less tune the comm radio. How do you learn to use all that stuff?

If its your airplane, you might call your friendly loca…

A friend assures me that he has developed a sure-fire method to duck out of jury duty. When the defense poses the first voir dire question, merely reply: Well, the police wouldnt have arrested him if he wasnt guilty.

If the judge doesnt threaten contempt, the defense attorney will immediately conclude that no one could possibly be that dumb. On the other hand, on the off chance that someone could, using up a challenge is cheap insurance. Next juror, please.

The irony of this absurdity is that in such life-and-death matters as jury trials, were spring-loaded to doubt the governments pronouncements. Yet as pilots, most of us react in the opposite way when confronted with ATC clear…

Among the most avoidable mishaps are those caused by fuel exhaustion. Most of them seem inexcusable, yet virtually every pilot has flirted with this danger at one time or another.

You may pass up refueling at a major metropolitan airport because of the price. Or youre in a hurry and rationalize that you can make it with good leaning or tail winds – especially if youve made the same trip before. If the winds are not as forecast or your leaning is a bit off, you could be in for trouble. Ditto if you fail to recheck the weather en route and arrive to find it below minimums.

According to the AOPA Air Safety Foundations Nall Report there were 95 accidents due to fuel exhaustion in 1998…