Aviation Safety

Garmin’s new GI 275 is a series of instruments designed to fit in the standard 3.125-inch panel opening but offer an all-electronic attitude indicator/attitude directional indicator (ADI), course deviation indicator (CDI), horizontal situation indicator (HSI) and engine indication system (EIS). At right, the attitude indicator version is shown at top, with the HSI at bottom. […]

Editor’s Note: This is the first in an occasional series of articles exploring the details and considerations of replacing conventional mechanical flight instruments with their electronic counterparts aboard a typical piston-powered personal airplane. While the series will necessarily involve comparing products, it also will evaluate the implications for operations and safety. My personal airplane is […]

Rereading Robert Wright’s article in the July 2019 issue (“North To Alaska”), in which he was following the British Columbia and Alaska coast, he writes that the latter part of the trip was “mostly on top” from Skagway to Cordova. For someone who is frequently advocating risk management, it is hard to understand his reasoning […]

For the most part, airplanes and helicopters aren’t environmentally friendly. They consume lots of petroleum and they distribute greenhouse gases throughout the planet, including otherwise inaccessible locations. They remain the best solution for many transportation challenges, however, and emerging technologies like electric powerplants and the same kind of noise-reduction incorporated into modern headsets hold promise […]

After a brake master cylinder was installed, the technician was unable to bleed the brake system. Fluid pulled from reservoir would return to reservoir through the same line as the internal bypass was not functioning properly. Master cylinder was disassembled and bypass was found stuck and unable to move. Metal shavings were found inside, and an O-ring was torn, with black specks mixed in with the shavings. Part replaced with new master cylinder.

Everyone talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it. (Stop me if youve 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, determining if the aircraft is capable, and making honest evaluations of our own performance in considering how and when to conduct a flight. But once we identify the need to mitigate a risk, we sometimes have little space left over to describe the tools we can use. Lets try to fix that.

The mission was a simple day trip from my home field in southwest Florida to a familiar destination in north-central Georgia of 407 nm, planned to take 2+30 one-way. Spend a few hours on the ground visiting with an old friend, grab a late lunch, then hop back home later the same day. The airplane was ready and willing. But the weather wasnt cooperating as I wanted. The destination airport offered its own challenges. And while I was instrument-current, I wasnt as proficient with low IFR as I would have liked.

Vintage aircraft often have vintage owners. Familiarity being a source of contempt, long-time owners of aircraft seeing little activity may also see little need to perform preventive maintenance or conduct regular inspections. It was just fine when I parked it; what could possibly have broken while it was sitting in a hangar? can be a familiar refrain to pilots who have owned the same airplane for a significant time. After a while, the pilot/owner is so familiar with the aircraft, he or she can tell somethings wrong just by the slipstream noise.

A few years ago, an engineer, friend and pilot shared a story about retrieving his Cessna 182RG from the paint shop. Before he took the plane out for a run-up and test flight, he asked his even more meticulous engineer-spouse do the preflight. When she did, she discovered something rather important. The bolts and nuts that connected the elevators were just hand-tightened, unsecured by cotter pins. The bolts and nuts securing the primary pitch control surfaces were essentially ready to fall out. Not good. My friend managed a major nuclear facility in Idaho, and he shared the story with his workforce as an example why operators should trust, but verify others work.

The Pacific Northwest, for the purposes of this article, includes the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming. Thats a huge hunk of territory and comprises more than 250,000 square miles for Washington, Oregon and Idaho alone. The region includes two major mountain ranges-the Cascades and the Northern Rockies-and many smaller ones, as well as several major river basins. There are major cities in the region, such as Seattle, Portland and Boise, but also thousands of square miles of largely empty land and wilderness.