Aviation Safety

Many pilots base the go-no-go decision on ceiling and visibility. Yet the accident record shows there are other considerations of equal or greater importance. For example, how many times have you delayed or canceled a flight because of forecast or reported severe turbulence enroute or at your destination?

The hazard of thunderstorms is obvious and can be visualized. However, high and low level clear air turbulence is often treated casually. When clear air turbulence is encountered above 15,000 feet, it is referred to as turbulence encountered outside of convective clouds. At lower altitudes it is simply mechanical or low level turbulence.

Low level turbulence often takes the form of…

The pilot of a single-engine experimental airplane climbed into the left seat, started the engine, taxied out to the runway at his California home base, and advanced the throttle for takeoff. As the plane left the ground, he discovered the awful truth.

After his last flight, he had wrapped the seat belt on the right seat around the right yoke, using the belt as a gust lock. Somehow, hed forgotten to release the belt before takeoff. The airplane stalled and veered left of the runway. In the crash, the pilot was seriously injured.

Youre laughing now, wondering how someone could be so, well, careless as to take off with the seat belt wrapped around the yoke. This is an extreme case of f…

It should come as no surprise that more than half of all general aviation aircraft are more than 25 years old, and more than 25% are past their 35th birthdays. Like everything else thats getting older, an aging aircraft can experience a host of problems, including decreases in both performance and structural integrity.

As aircraft age, undetected or uncorrected wear, fatigue, corrosion and creep can decrease an aircrafts ability to sustain the fail-safe loads designed into it. The most graphic example of fatigue and corrosion causing a serious problem in flight comes is the Aloha Air Lines B-737 accident in 1988, and that should be enough to scare any pilot. Clearly prevention, timely d…

Just as how we dress and what we drive help define who we are, so, too, does what we fly.

The practical ones drive sedans and fly Skyhawks; the rowdy ones lean toward sports cars and stunt planes. Somewhere in the mix is the large group of people whose wheels of choice are sport utility vehicles and pick-up trucks.

These load-haulers may be working, they may be playing, but theyre doing it hard. For them, a utility airplane is a natural.

The Cessna U206 has, over the years, gained a well-deserved reputation for its load-hauling ability. With its big rear doors and spacious cabin, it has found work as a cargo hauler, bush plane and jump plane. As an airplane for campers, hunters an…

The return trip from mid-state New York to Nashua, N.H., was being made with some urgency. The pilot had an important meeting to attend. The meeting became the last thing on his mind, however, when the engine coughed to a stop only part way home.

His very first thoughts: Oh damn! Im going to splatter myself among the trees below and kill myself! I can just hear my friends at the funeral. He seemed to be a pretty smart fellow, how could he do something so stupid?

After his initial shock at the silence, he became focused on the problem at hand. Rock the wings, theres always some fuel left in the tanks. The engine sputtered a few minutes and then quit again. He spied a small field…

While it may not have the sex appeal of politics or religion, oil analysis will spark some lively debate if you put together a group of pilots or mechanics. Some people shrug it off as an expensive exercise in futility that tells little about the inner secrets of engine wear. Others swear to their engines health if they get good sample results and get ready to shoot it if they dont.

In fact, the true value of analysis is somewhere in the middle. It cant tell you how long your engine is going to live and its far from a sure-fire way to predict catastrophic failure. On the other hand, experienced eyes can spot wear trends that can catch minor problems before they turn into big ones. Whe…

The word emergency comes from the classical Greek, Emergos, meaning lets get out of here. Consider Icarus, the pilot who disregarded the service ceiling limitation on his Daedulus Skycoupe and failed to handle the subsequent forced landing by foolishly attempting a turn back to the island of Crete. Icarus perished because he had no plan to get out of there.

Three thousand years later, experienced pilots still take off with little thought of engine failure. Maybe thats because engines are fairly reliable and such a tiny portion of a flight is spent in the climb.

Still, depending on the type of aircraft, as many as 20 percent of emergency landings originate in the takeoff and cli…

The student pilot was headed north-west on one of his first solo cross-country flights. The planned track took him from Dalhart, Texas, to the Denver, Colo., area. Preflight weather contained nothing ominous or unusual.Once airborne, everything was going routinely, except that the clouds began to thicken imperceptibly as he eased across the border into Colorado and a light chop began to develop.

Suddenly, the pilot found a solid overcast beneath him with thickening clouds and even more rapidly deteriorating weather.

On the ground, convective Sigmets unexpectedly appeared – as they often can in areas near the significant influence of the Rocky Mountains.Insidiously, two distinct l…

The column of black smoke rose like an obscene gesture to the north west of our control tower at Reid Hillview airport in San Jose, Calif. Id just come off a break and saw it as I stepped into the tower cab. The ground controller was busy lining up a string of trainers from one of the flying schools.

The tower controller, or what we called the Local controller, had a loaded traffic pattern with two parallel runways – one full of touch and go traffic the other reserved for itinerants. It was a busy shift, no different than most, except for the black smoke.

The phone rang, Did you guys lose one? the unidentified caller asked. I looked around. Nothing seemed out of order. No, I sa…

Roy Rogers had Trigger; the Lone Ranger had Silver. And each of them knew they could count on their horse to help them out of a jam. They knew the horse would always be up to snuff. They knew if the horse could jump that ravine or catch that steaming locomotive. Of course, it always would.

Similarly, pilots put a lot of faith into their trusted steeds. After a while flying the same airplane, rotation comes by feel and sound, with sometimes only a cursory glance at the airspeed indicator. Landings at familiar fields are made without second thought.

While that may not be unsafe, sometimes the shortcuts can be more onerous. Some pilots have virtually abandoned weight and balance calcula…