Pilot Proficiency

Walking into the FBO in Charlottesville, Virginia, I hear, “I don’t like your stuff. I used to like you, but I don’t anymore. You are drinking way too much Kool-Aid.” I am a little taken aback by this tirade. I look up to see a NetJets captain. “You make this sound way better than it is,” […]

On a cold night in ­early spring, I took off from Lunken Airport in 72B, my beloved (I think) Cessna 180. I came back to climb power at 500 feet agl and the engine began running rough, missing and losing power — which sort of caught my attention. So, I pulled on the carburetor heat […]

I don’t know about you, but I sure love being proved right. Lord knows it happens rarely enough at home, so I have to look for small victories elsewhere. As it so happens, writing a ­monthly column for a widely read ­aviation magazine makes for a potentially rich vein of retrospective sagacity. Thus I was […]

The investigator concluded that the probable cause of the accident was improper soft-field-takeoff technique.

“Making power … airspeed alive … 80 knots … V1 … rotate … positive rate.” Martha, as pilot monitoring, was making the call-outs for my first takeoff in our old Falcon 10 in more than a year. And the takeoff wasn’t pretty. When it’s lightly loaded, the Falcon 10 takes off like a scalded cat. […]

The FAA, it is said, lags technology-sometimes significantly. These pages have been sprinkled with examples over the years. One recent example was in Jeff Van Wests article, A Bit Over Ninety, which appeared just last month.In that article, Jeff touched on the protected airspace for a turn at a fix. Before area navigation, all airways and procedures were designed expecting us to pass over the fix, suddenly realize that fact, and then turn to intercept the outbound course.

Flight Design, based in Germany, has long held a top spot in deliveries of light sport airplanes in the U.S., but it has been in receivership in Germany since February 2016. The company announced in July it now has new owners, Lift Air, from Eisenach, Germany. I am glad that we are able to maintain the know-how of one of the worlds market leaders in the light aircraft sector and to secure it with a well-funded investor, said Knut Rebholz, insolvency administrator. The company will now be called Flight Design General Aviation GmbH. Tom Peghiny, president of Flight Design USA, told AVweb hes thrilled with the news.

The absolute best bang for the buck in charting is via a tablet and app as youre using. You didnt mention your transponder, but if youve got a new Garmin GTX 345, youve already got some connectivity between the iPad and GNS430W. Otherwise, you might consider a Flightstream 210 for that connection to exchange a lot of data between tablet and navigator.

I discovered aviation years ago after winning a free hour in a United Airlines DC-10 simulator. It wasn’t long before I started taking flying lessons at Centennial Airport in Colorado, where I trained in the high-density- altitude days of summer. If nothing else, the anemic aircraft performance taught me discipline as it related to airspeed: […]

The RNAV GPS Z approach to Runway 3 at Santa Monica is so new (April 2017), many pilots might not yet even be aware of its existence. (Two additional approaches to SMO were commissioned at the same time.) This new approach comes with a handful of restrictions, many of which are significant enough to demand […]