Pilot Proficiency

As fall and winter starts to set in and the days grow shorter, it is important to make sure that your night flying skills are up to snuff. Flying can take a lot more time than you may initially plan for. With less daylight to play with you are more likely to find yourself left […]

I had just finished packing my suitcase and refueling my rental car, ready to depart L’Agulhas, a sleepy fishing village built on the soft green hills and limestone rocks of Africa’s southernmost point. My last two days in South Africa were spent soaking up the sunlit serenity of this surfside enclave where the Atlantic and […]

Climbing over large boulders blocking the mouth of a narrow, sandy canyon near Joshua Tree, California, I stopped to catch my breath. Somewhere on the steep, rock-strewn hills just ahead, the remains of a TA-4F Skyhawk lay undisturbed. At 3:07 p.m. on Oct. 23, 1969, the ill-fated jet on a training flight originating in Yuma, […]

Engines, aircraft, and the rules and certification standards and procedures that govern them have evolved together since the 1930s on the seemingly firm foundation of leaded avgas, which forms part of the operating limitations on which the type certificates of aircraft and engines are based. Fuels and fuel systems have come to be perfectly matched […]

No wonder the White House believes it’s winning the 10-day-old standoff with Republicans over the government shutdown. With the power he has American businesses, including much of the aviation industry, the president holds what might be an unbeatable hand. If Republicans didn’t know it before, they do now. With one phone call to Transportation Secretary […]

If the registration for your airplane is expiring at the end of this month and the government shutdown continues past October 31, you could face a thorny proposition: Should you consider your airplane grounded or keep flying as though nothing has happened? Based on an unscientific survey of pilots on online message boards, most appear […]

Hearing about John and Martha King’s encounter with law enforcement and reading about similar horror stories, I adjusted my eye patch and was about to swing through the rigging, knife in teeth, in defense of pilots’ rights. Like Clark Kent, I would use my journalistic skills to battle the forces of evil — menacing cops […]

There has been considerable consternation in the aviation media recently about the lack of progress in improving the general aviation accident rate. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman recently expressed her frustration that the general aviation accident rate in the United States has essentially plateaued at around 1,500 accidents every year, emphasizing that the […]

While paved areas at airports are generally flat, there are times when runways, taxiways and parking areas are sloped. While sloped runways and taxiways in some cases require extra attention, sloped parking areas can cause major problems. I recently visited a beautiful airport in the southern part of the Sierra Nevada Mountains called Kern Valley […]

More than six decades after Navy test pilot George Thackray Weems perished in an airplane crash at the age of 30, the story of his journey across the world with his father, famous navigator P.V.H. Weems, is finally being told in George’s own words. In Box Kite to Bali: The Last Great Adventure of a […]