FLYING Magazine

In August 2015, a Florence, South Carolina, doctor, 51, left his home field early in the morning on a vacation trip whose eventual destination was the Grand Canyon.

Sitting just a few miles north of the Tennessee-Georgia state line, Chattanooga’s Lovell Field (CHA) saw nearly 60,000 takeoffs and landings last year, with the Tracon workload hovering near 90,000 aircraft, nearly 50,000 of which operated into the airport on an IFR flight plan. Chattanooga’s airport elevation is less than 1,000 feet, but a glance […]

Sitting just north of the Los Angeles Class B airspace, Van Nuys Airport, which is Class D, is one of the busiest in the United States, with a single set of parallel runways: the 8,001-by-150-foot Runway 1/16 Right, and adjacent Runway 1/16 Left, at 4,013 by 75 feet. Last year, VNY logged just shy of […]

I was irritated to receive a phone call assigning me to a flight the next day, which was both my wedding anniversary and Thanksgiving, but such is the life of a charter pilot. I would be riding right seat in our Piaggio Avanti with its regular captain, Mike, taking a family on a last-minute flight […]

Do you know the difference between civil twilight, nautical twilight and astronomical twilight?

For pilots expecting never again to face a non-precision approach tied to a land-based navaid, we can confirm that rumors of the demise of the VOR have been greatly exaggerated. In 2016, the FAA began eliminating many of the GPS overlay approaches tied to older VOR procedures ahead of plans to also eliminate a significant […]

When I earned my private ticket in 1960, jet aircraft were still rather rare, even in the San Fernando Valley. My home field, Whiteman Air Park in Pacoima, California, was near Van Nuys and Lockheed airports, both of which were busy commercial fields. The local landing and departing traffic was mainly at piston-engine airspeeds, which […]

Although the Morristown Six could easily be confused with a ’60s rock-and-roll band, the name actually applies to a standard instrument departure procedure, also known as a SID. SIDs look and feel different from traditional approach procedures, often including far more information arranged in a complex layout some pilots might find confusing. Air traffic control […]

About halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, in California’s vast Central Valley, lies Harris Ranch, an unlikely and welcoming island on an otherwise uninterrupted sea of drab and dusty farmland. The “ranch” is actually a complex of steak restaurants, a hotel, gas station and other amenities designed as a destination rest stop for drivers […]

Clouds are mostly harmless, but sometimes they turn on you.