Pilot Proficiency

Recently a friend sent me a blurb from another aviation magazine about the restoration of a Beech Staggerwing — arguably the ultimate classic airplane — by the Kansas Aviation Museum. He knew I’d be interested in this particular D17S because it belonged at one time to my ex- and late husband, Ebby Lunken. Unfortunately, when […]

I’ve been reading this magazine for two-thirds of my life, ever since I was an eager-eyed lad of 12. Back then, the arrival of Flying‘s newest issue was a highlight of my month. I’d read Len Morgan first, then Gordon Baxter, then Mac McClellan, Dick Collins and Peter Garrison, and then everything else. I had […]

In June 2010, a Cessna T310R crashed in fine weather while on final approach at Ruidoso, New Mexico. Five people perished, two survived. The survivors were 12 and 16 years old, and I suspect that they were probably in the aftmost seats. Another young person, an 11-year-old boy, was double-­belted in the right front seat […]

Over the course of your flying career you’ll likely experience several technological advances that will change the way you fly. In the early years of aviation, these came in the form of new airframe design and propulsion innovations, such as the transition from tailwheel to tricycle landing gear and turbojet engines. Next came the development […]

Think of the stick shaker/pusher found in transport-category aircraft as a bit of a lazy pilot’s angle of attack indicator. Should the flying pilot become distracted enough that they fail to notice an increasing angle of attack, to a point where the wing is about to cease producing sufficient lift, an airplane equipped with a […]

This is an old story, but it’s one I still think about often. In January 1960, I found myself in the right seat of an 85 hp Luscombe 8F on top of a thick layer of smog blanketing the infamous Los Angeles basin, the setting sun perilously close to the western horizon. The pilot, my […]

Visual approaches offer pilots an opportunity to remain within the IFR system but fly direct to the airport on their own. Once ATC issues a visual approach, however, responsibility for navigation and terrain clearance is transferred from the ground to the cockpit. Avionics manufacturers recently began adding visual-­approach capabilities to their navigation suites to create […]

Icon started to deliver airplanes to customers in June, and let them take them home and fly them wherever they want, the company said in its annual newsletter. The first deliveries went to owners in Seattle, Montana and California. To support these A5s, Icon said it trained authorized maintainers at their home airports. We are continuing to grow the third-party partner network to service upcoming deliveries that arent near factory service centers, currently in Vacaville and Tampa, Icon said. The company also said it has trained more than 125 pilots at its two Icon Flight Centers, and added that it hopes to deliver 15 more aircraft by the end of this year and ramp up to 200 deliveries in 2018.

I submitted a PIREP yesterday that didnt get disseminated properly. Not only did it not show up during the 1.7 hours left in the flight, it wasnt listed when I checked after landing on the aviationweather.gov/adds web site for PIREPs in the previous eight hours. However, after submitting an inquiry about this to Lockheed Martin, it showed up the next morning (about 20 hours after the flight).

In the April issue of IFR, Fred Simonds wrote an article that did an excellent job of explaining how the FAAs Compliance Philosophy program, started in 2015, seeks to encourage pilot compliance with the regulations through guidance rather than punishment. He also provided data that strongly indicated it has had the effect of reducing the number of pilot deviation events (potential violations) that turned into violation actions seeking punishment of pilots to nearly zero.But, youll still want to be careful.