Aviation Safety

You often hear pilots discussing whether a plane is a good IFR platform. Heres what theyre discussing and how to decide if your airplane measures up.

Precious little maintenance guidance is available to aircraft owners. Here are ten tips to save you some bucks and whittle down flight risks.

Not every airport has 10,000 feet of pavement for your takeoff. Heres how to know when you need to plan takeoffs and how to do it.

High-and-fast research flying is as risky as it gets. Planning is key. Heres how Scott Crossfield learned to recognize and manage the risks.

The Stormscope and weather radar are good support instruments and should be used only to verify what you already know visually.

It was a normal June afternoon in the Washington, D.C., area-hazy, hot and humid. The main event was preparing for former president Ronald Reagans state funeral later in the week.

On Capitol Hill, the normal ebb and flow of tourists, interns and official Washington went on unremarkably. Suddenly, alarms blared, beepers beeped and people began running. You have one minute to impact! police reportedly announced. Images of well-dressed men and women sprinting away from the Capitol-some kicking off their shoes-were captured by the media.

But it was all a false alarm. A Beech King Air carrying Kentuckys governor was inbound to the otherwise-closed-to-GA DCA under a special waiver progra…

The following information is derived from the FAAs Service Difficulty Reports and Aviation Maintenance Alerts.

———-

Pilatus Aircraft Models PC-12 and PC-12/45
Flap Flexshafts
A new airworthiness directive (AD 2004-12-11) for all Pilatus Aircraft Ltd. (Pilatus) Models PC-12 and PC-12/45 airplanes requires checking the airplane logbook to determine whether certain inboard and outboard flap flexshafts (part numbers 945.02.02.203 and/or 945.02.02.204) have been replaced with parts of improved design. If not, operators must replace certain inboard and/or outboard flap flexshafts with the parts of improved design. The pilot is allowed to do the logbook check. If the pi…

Experience Yourself
Paul Bertorellis article (June 2004) describing a flight from Florida to Oklahoma through a line of thunderstorms ended with his co-pilot wondering aloud how a less-experienced pilot-say a new Cirrus owner with 300 hours-could learn to do what they had just done. It got me thinking how Ive been approaching the answer to this question.

I am just shy of 300 hours and earned my Instrument rating last fall. Ive actively sought out flyable IMC, amassing 50 hours of actual instrument time, and I purchased a well-equipped Grumman Tiger. Knowing your personal flying machine is a prerequisite for safe IFR flying. For me, thats been the easy part. I bought a ma…

Selected recent general aviation and airline accidents

At approximately 1925 Eastern time, the Piper Arrow impacted terrain while attempting the ILS Runway 23 approach to the Adirondack Regional Airport (SLK) in Harrietstown, N.Y. The private pilot and passenger were fatally injured and the airplane substantially damaged. Night IMC prevailed for the flight from Leesburg, Va. According to the NTSBs preliminary review of radar data, the airplane crossed the SLK VOR at 6000 feet and proceeded outbound, descending to 5000 feet. About nine miles from the SLK VOR, the airplane made a left turn, then turned to the right approximately 10 seconds later. The right turn continued until intercepting the final approach course for the Runway 23 localizer, wh…