Pilot Proficiency

The National Transportation Safety Board’s determination that a** 29-year-old Cessna pilot’s use of his cell phone to take selfies in flight caused a crash** that killed him and a passenger has a lot of folks scratching their heads. For starters, there’s no evidence that the pilot was taking pictures with his cell phone when the […]

“Gentlemen, start your engines!” The crowd cheered as Mitchell Municipal Airport reverberated with the sound of 50 piston power plants rumbling to life. Dozens of slick homebuilt airplanes with flashy paint jobs and neatly applied race numbers taxied in a long line to the runway. “Race 38, cleared for takeoff,” boomed the loudspeaker, and a […]

Last night, after an eight-hour flight across the North Atlantic ocean, I flew into the world’s busiest airspace, acting as the pilot monitoring. I suddenly found myself perplexed by a right roll into an unexpected course change. My monitoring had obviously failed. The pilot-flying had made a mistake in his automation input, and the result […]

Despite the hard work from every segment of aviation, we have to reluctantly admit that there are still unforeseeable factors that can lead to incidents and accidents. From TWA Flight 800 to Air France 447, seemingly standard missions can be hit by disaster, with flight crews left unable to respond adequately, if at all. Through […]

As a pilot, you can experience many things that non-pilots can’t. You can defy gravity and watch as the world below floats by like a movie. You can travel to faraway places and land in areas inaccessible by other means. But have you ever realized that you can use the airplane as a time machine? […]

Hovering over a counter in Operations, I tapped at my iPad screen. I was reviewing WSI weather information for our flight south from JFK to Buenos Aires, Argentina. The satellite picture indicated a wispy but clearly defined line of cloud cover that stretched in a curved path from the Florida Keys all the way to […]

It is 14 nautical miles from Chicago’s Midway airport to O’Hare International, but it goes by quickly at 250 knots. By the time the gear is up, you’re already getting the ATIS and entering the runway and its precision-like approach into the FMS. And don’t forget to call the FBO before you depart and tell […]

Even if you’ve never flown a taildragger, you probably know what a “groundloop” is. If not, it’s a sudden loss of directional control on the ground that’s normally associated with taildraggers, which have their centers of gravity aft of the pivot point and so naturally want to swap ends on landing. But can you groundloop […]

The pilot, 73, had more than 18,000 hours and an ATP certificate. He and his wife, an instrument-rated private pilot with over 800 hours, kept several airplanes, all vintage or Experimental, on their private strip in northeastern Pennsylvania. One of these was a taxicab-yellow 1944 Cessna T-50 “Bamboo Bomber,” a five-seat steel-tube-and-fabric taildragger with two […]

It was late, the end of a long and trying day, and we hadn’t even left the state of Texas. I caught glimpses of muted scrubland far below as we flitted in and out of dusky cumulus. I shifted in the right seat and glanced over at Johnny in the dim red cockpit light. The […]