Pilot Proficiency

Illustrations by Matthew Laznicka| Clayton, New Mexico — way east of the Rocky Mountains, out on the Great Plains. A humid June afternoon. We had finished up in court and were sitting around in the judge’s office. The phone rang. The judge handed it to me. My friend, the airport weather forecaster, spoke abruptly: “Margaret, […]

Every pilot knows that flying is an intense mixture of uncommon rewards offset with exposure to risk. After all, while airplanes provide some of the greatest pleasures in our lifetimes, they do have to reach a lethal speed just to get airborne and then fly at thousands of feet above the ground. Balancing the risk/reward […]

Flying with friends and fellow pilots can be the best times, but it also has the potential to turn into a nightmare. This can happen when the person beside or behind you becomes a backseat flier. While it is important to speak up in cases that could turn into safety or legal issues, constant reminders […]

We’ve recently had a Tanis engine preheater installed in our Diamond DA40 to deal with the ill effects of the arctic polar vortex blast — words that should never follow each other in a single sentence, in my opinion. The preheater is designed to keep the cylinders warmed to a temperature 70 degrees above ambient […]

In our FBO Spotlight series, we’re highlighting FBOs around the country that have received rave reviews from our readers. This latest Spotlight is brought to you by Vincent Latona, who has recently flown into Scottsdale Airport in Scottsdale, Arizona, in a TBM 850. Here’s what he had to say about one of the airport’s FBOs, […]

What does it take to build the coolest airplane ever? In the case of college student Luca Iaconi-Stewart’s creation — which definitely gets our vote for most spectacular paper airplane — the answer to that question is five years of effort and an abundance of glue and manila cardboard folders. The 22-year-old constructed this incredible […]

You’ve probably noticed that test pilots, law enforcement and emergency response pilots, and pilots flying military airplanes generally wear flight suits. You are also likely aware that these pilots don’t wear these garments just to fit into some kind of fraternity or to look cool. Flight suits serve a purpose. While you may not want […]

A few years back, a Cessna 172 pilot had trouble starting his airplane and decided to hand-prop it near the Typhoon restaurant at the Santa Monica airport. No one was inside the Skyhawk. The engine spun up, and the airplane made a solo trip across runway 21. In the process, it made a business jet […]

It was an old story. A relatively inexperienced pilot practicing landings got too slow on final approach, stalled and crashed. The pilot, 56, was flying a club Cherokee 180, a type in which he had logged 13 of his 130 hours. He was making a short round-robin cross-country flight, ostensibly for practice, with landings at […]

There I was: fat, dumb and happy. My friend Tim and I had taken my 1977 Mooney 201 from Camden, South Carolina, to Myrtle Beach to get the oxygen cylinder filled. We filed IFR on the outbound leg at 7,000 feet msl and had to fly the ILS at Myrtle Beach to get through some […]