Pilot Proficiency

The conventional wisdom about millennials goes something like this: They would rather sit inside and play Xbox all day than go to the airport and learn to fly airplanes. Mind you, nobody ever presents any evidence to show this is in fact true, but in our gut we all kind of understand there’s at least […]

An old TWA captain once told me that the definition of a successful aviation career is when the chief pilot meets your retirement flight and wonders aloud, “Who the heck are you?” There’s some good advice buried in that witticism, and I’ve tried to live by it over the course of my career. I had […]

This normally nontowered airport was probably the busiest it had ever been. The airport needed to land an airplane about every minute and a half to accommodate the arrivals in the time available between sunrise and 10:30 a.m., when everyone wanted to be on the ground. The trick was getting everyone off the runway and […]

Mainstream media and social-network users have not been kind to the airlines over the past several months. In some cases of less than exemplary customer service, the negative publicity is well-deserved. That being said, the handful of edited YouTube snippets being broadcast on network television can be mischaracterized, overblown, distorted and taken out of context. […]

With the early morning sun just beginning to brighten the sky, my 1966 Piper Cherokee climbed from Meriden Markham Airport’s (KMMK) Runway 18. The conditions in Meriden, Connecticut, were clear, with calm winds — a perfect day for flying. Armed with a Special Flight Rules Area VFR flight plan, I turned toward my destination, Tipton […]

Note to readers: What follows could be considered obnoxious. Or maybe it is a cautionary tale. It is a story of a man about to turn 72 who has been flying for 50 years and owned airplanes almost continuously since 1972. This is a description of this man’s thought processes as he navigates the realities […]

In September 2014, a Cessna 172 overtook and collided with a homebuilt Searey amphibian on final approach to the Buffalo-Lancaster Regional Airport (KBQR) in Lancaster, New York. The 172 pilot, 78, with 2,500 hours, and his 14-year-old passenger died when their airplane spiraled out of control and crashed. Remarkably—since one tends to think of midair […]

Localizer-only approaches have been around for decades, providing better-than-VOR lateral guidance while demanding no special cockpit avionics except the standard VOR-ILS indicator common to most airplanes. When it comes to accuracy, full-scale deflection of the course-deviation indicator from the center on a VOR signal represents 12 degrees off course, while a similar deflection on the […]

The Navy says Paramount’s 1986 classic fighter-pilot flick Top Gun persuaded men and women to join up in numbers not seen before or since. Over a cup of coffee near St. Maarten’s famous Maho Beach (pre-Hurricane Irma), Rob Ceravolo told me the film worked some of its magic on him and was at least partially […]

I made my first trip to Oshkosh in 2007 to unveil the Redbird FMX simulator prototype at AirVenture. That was the start of what would become an annual tradition for me, a pilgrimage north from Austin, Texas, along with 500,000 fellow general aviation disciples, to take part in the “World’s Greatest Aviation Celebration.” Last year, […]