Pilot Proficiency

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.

Teterboro is one of the busiest business aviation airports in the United States, handling 178,000 takeoffs and landings annually, many on IFR flight plans. Most runways offer a straight-in approach, except Runway 1. KTEB’s proximity to nearby Newark Liberty means the best approach available to Runway 1 is the ILS Runway 6, circle to land […]

Part of what makes Flight Chops videos so successful (and entertaining) is that Steve Thorne gets to fly the planes most of us don’t have the opportunity to fly, and he gets test gear that we don’t necessarily get to use. For his latest episode, Chops and friends tested one piece of equipment that we […]

I realized at some point during my instrument training that airplanes are a lot more like horses than they are like cars, and pilots can learn a lot by approaching their machines with this in mind. As a child I rode horses — a lot. We had four of them on our property. As a […]

The newest version of Sporty’s Learn to Fly course is now available, and it’s the biggest update ever, featuring hours of updated HD video and the ability to switch among three viewing formats (online, iPhone/iPad and Apple TV) for one price. A student’s progress as he or she takes the course automatically syncs no matter […]

Again we follow in the footsteps of the late crash investigator Macarthur Job and focus on aviation accidents. This time, instead of taking a look at forecast ingredients, well look at cases of where the pilots simply made the wrong decisions for the weather.