General

It was just a rumor, but I liked the idea. I’d heard that the FAA was going to equip all the airplanes in the Washington, D.C., area with ADS-B and UAT so it could better monitor their movements. The rumor got legs from the unfortunate, apparently inadvertent, incursion by the Cessna 150 into the Washington […]

One of the time-honored conventions of aviation journalism is that every article about metal fatigue has to start with mention of the “ill-fated Comet.” That requirement has now been met. Metal fatigue did not begin with the Comet. By the middle of the 19th century ferrous metals-irons and steels-were in common use in industrial machinery, […]

The crash of the American Airlines Airbus in New York in November of 2001, has revealed that what nearly every pilot of all experience levels believed about maneuvering speed, Va, is incorrect. It turns out that a pilot can break the airframe by moving the flight controls even when flying at an airspeed below Va. […]

The FAA decided a while back that “distractions” are a factor in accidents, especially IFR accidents, and added them to the Practical Test Standards guide. The FAA also recently added use of equipment to the PTS including glass cockpits, use of the standby instruments for a non-precision approach, GPS approaches and autopilot use that applicants […]

It’s tempting to say that before the September 11 terrorist attacks we had nearly total freedom to fly as we pleased in our national airspace. But that would be a delusion. Access to much of our airspace has not been unfettered for decades, and the right to fly in very large portions of airspace has […]

Can one man’s love affair with flying safely lead him from a Skylane to the jet lane? Richard Collins evaluates one pilot’s flying. Don Stephens, 67, is a (retiring), as he puts it, builder/developer. He has been flying out of the Lakeland, Florida, airport since he started 37 years ago and has owned a Cessna […]

I don’t remember where the two men came from. I don’t even really remember what they looked like. But I remember the question. The three of us were sitting on barstools at a Key West, Florida, watering hole, making our way through a couple of requisite local margaritas and telling tales of flying and adventure. […]

A training hurricane in western Pennsylvania I had been flying the full-motion flight training device (FTD) for a few minutes and was lining up for an ILS to Runway 4 at New York La Guardia when I asked Rich Kaplan, proprietor of Flight Level Aviation, the name of the hurricane in which we were flying. […]

“If we don’t start moving soon,” I find myself thinking as my frustration simmers into overboil, “I swear to God I’m going to scream.” I’m sitting in the middle of the I-580 freeway, which currently looks more like a big valet parking lot that just happens to be four traffic lanes wide. I’ve been on […]