Aviation Safety

Outside of large training organizations or fleet operations, there is little standardization of equipment, systems or procedures within general aviation. Toss in a few years among different owners and identical airplanes that rolled off an assembly line together 10 or 20 years earlier will vary wildly in their equipment, maintenance history and wear and tear. […]

The aftereffects of the FAA’s January 11, 2023, Notam system outage continue to ripple through the industry. If you’re just joining us, you should know the FAA was forced to issue a ground-stop in U.S. airspace after Notams (notices to air missions) became unavailable during a glitchy system upgrade. According to online sister publication AVweb.com, […]

In a perfect aviation world, skies would always be clear, our engines would merely sip cheap fuel by the pint instead of guzzle it by the gallon, and the winds always would be right down the runway. That world, of course, doesn’t exist, so we’re forced to get an instrument rating, plan fuel stops and […]

As long as we fly aircraft with retractable landing gear, there will be gear-up landings, a phenomenon not unique to any one make or model of airplane. Read the daily FAA aircraft incident reports—the vast majority of which do not meet NTSB reporting criteria and so will not be investigated further or included in official […]

Wally, who was nearly thrice my age, was giving me a Taylorcraft checkout at a grass strip. I already had a tailwheel endorsement, but my insurer wanted time in-type for the new (to me) BC-12D. There were no systems to learn, so all I needed were a couple of stalls and about a hundred laps […]

Everyone talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it.” (Stop me if you’ve heard that before.) The same could be said about managing the risk of general aviation. We—both this magazine and the industry as a whole—spend a lot of time preaching to pilots about the mechanics of understanding weather forecasts, […]

As an old naval aviator with many night carrier landings—the ultimate black hole—I could not help but notice there was no reference to using the PAPI on glideslope in Jim Wolper’s February 2023 article, “The Black-Hole Approach.” On the carrier, we had the meatball for a glideslope. Our scan was, meatball, centerline, angle of attack. […]

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 […]

Cessna 402B Businessliner Oil Seal Failure During descent into the destination, the pilot could see oil streaking back from top cowl louvers and oil pressure began dropping. Pilot shut down engine and feathered prop. Landed without issue. Maintenance found oil aft of the accessory gearbox, appearing to be from around the turbo area. Further investigation […]

A friend of mine and I departed our home airport in my 1976 Piper Arrow II. I recently had a new autopilot installed in the airplane and, while initial test flights showed everything worked as expected, we wanted to go put the new equipment through some exercises. We were eager to see how it worked, which […]