Aviation Safety

Many emergency checklist items should be reflexive and committed to memory. On the ground, you can roll your own, but never forget flying the airplane is first.

The inoperative table doesn’t cover every possible system failure. Plus, you also need to consider facility outages and equipment failures at your alternate.

Each anti- or de-icing technology has benefits and drawbacks. If you’re flying with boots, use them early and often.

A pilot launching for Hawaii proves the first few moments of any heavy or overweight takeoff are critical.

The inoperative table doesn’t cover every possible system failure. Plus, you also need to consider facility outages and equipment failures at your alternate.

With 200 hours and my VFR-only private ticket, I felt confident about the day’s flight. I was taking off at 0500 with the small airport at Uvalde, Texas, as my destination. Weather and everything else looked pretty good for the 1.5-hour hop, with scattered clouds and a higher broken layer above.

The following information is derived from the FAA’s Service Difficulty Reports and Aviation Maintenance Alerts.

Just because the vast majority of the airplanes most of us fly have their little wheel mounted on the nose instead of the tail doesn’t mean the nosewheel is immune to abuse. Nor does it mean we can ignore the nosewheel’s peculiarities, even if an airplane with one is much easier to handle on the ground.

The FAA-prescribed practical test is the final hurdle every pilot must pass to earn a new certificate or rating, and the practical test standards (PTS) are where the requirements for success are spelled out. The PTS is what both aspiring pilots and examiners use to determine what’s to be done on a practical test and how. It’s supposed to be the final assessment of whether a pilot can conduct safe flight operations.

The U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) last month published a report recommending the FAA set specific goals for improving general aviation safety and employ a data-driven approach to minimize risks. Those are the same kinds of things we’ve been advocating pilots do to enhance their own safety for as long as I can remember and is something we certainly support.But how to go about it? Part of the problem, according to the GAO, anyway, is a lack of reliable data on pilot and aircraft activity against which to compare accidents and incidents, and compute their occurrence rate.