Pilot Proficiency

On August 30, 2016, at 1801 Pacific daylight time, a Beechcraft A36 Bonanza was destroyed when it impacted the ground in a near vertical descent, likely as a result of a wake turbulence encounter on approach to landing at Reno-Tahoe International Airport in Reno, Nevada. The thing that caught my attention was that the pilot […]

Maybe it’s because I’ve screwed up more than most (living) pilots, but I often get calls from angry, confused or worried aviators: “Fiddling with my iPad and taxied across a hold-short line”; “Didn’t check notams and flew through a TFR”; “Assumed the other guy was PIC”; “Forgot about my flight-review (annual, physical, etc.) date”; “Blew […]

Imagine I asked you the following question during your next flight review: If you had the choice, would you rather fly directly through a line of embedded thunderstorms along your planned route of flight or use datalink radar imagery on your iPad to deviate around the weather system? You’d probably take a curious look at […]

A phalanx of restricted and Military Operating Areas confronts pilots heading north out of Los Angeles. Between sprawling Edwards Air Force Base and the Naval Air Weapons Station situated at water-free China Lake, a pilot studying the chart for the first time must think the way impassable. The alternatives are inconvenient doglegs: either fly up […]

I grew up and learned to fly on the snow-swept plains of Minnesota, but I really grew up in the crowded, smoggy skies over Southern California. It’s where I spent a couple of lean years flight instructing and freight dogging, making lifelong friends while scrambling to make ends meet on some vanishingly small paychecks. I […]

The 1993 movie Groundhog Day is an American classic. The film has become synonymous with routine and repetition. Recalling the final scene, Bill Murray wakes up to the radio alarm clock when the last digit clicks to 6:00, just as it had done hundreds of times before. The same Sonny & Cher lyrics of “I […]

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 […]

She’s sitting there, right outside those double glass doors, resplendent in the Midwest afternoon sunlight. I am imprisoned with three others in a conference room just a few feet from the ramp. If I lean back I can see her, all detailed, shiny and standing remarkably tall. No Ferrari ever looked better on the delivery […]

This week’s throwback Thursday edition of Flight Chops begins with a simple question: Could you survive with nothing but the kit in your airplane? “It’s the responsibility of the pilot in command to keep their aircraft and passengers safe,” Steve Thorne, AKA Flight Chops, explains in the opening of this video from earlier in the […]

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