Pilot Proficiency

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 […]

If the George Zimmerman trial wasn’t enough to feed a media frenzy, a major airplane crash at one of the country’s busiest airports filled the remaining void. When I was contacted by a national TV network to validate a specific nuance of the 777 automation system, I actually considered that maybe this time the media […]

In March 2012 in southern Georgia, a hot-air balloon was sucked into a thunderstorm. Carried to 17,000 feet in an updraft, battered by 1-inch hail, its fabric envelope tore open and collapsed. Only four days later did searchers finally locate it in a forested area miles from the launch point. Large clumps of compacted hail […]

It was five years ago this week that the wheels came off the global economy. As we all vividly remember, the U.S. government bailout of AIG and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 sent the Dow into a tailspin unlike anything we had seen in decades. The historic Great Recession was officially under […]

Burr’s Berry Farm is well known for its famous strawberry milkshakes. Tourists and locals line up around the small berry stand where Mrs. Burr keeps the tradition of the farm alive. In back of the stand are rows of hydroponically grown strawberry plants elevated so that customers can pick their own strawberries without even having […]

Pilots who’ve been flying for many years or decades rarely spend much of their time in the air practicing takeoffs and landings. By simply making a half dozen or so trips around the pattern in between planning those trips to distant airports we can knock off the rust the best way possible. Think about it: […]

The body of David Riggs has been recovered from the lake near Shenyang, China, where his Lancair 320 crashed last week. Unfortunately the story hit close to home for me. I hate to admit it, but I flew with Riggs a few years ago. It is an understatement to say that the flight left a […]

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 Mark Warner, who recently flew into Pensacola Gulf Coast Regional Airport in Pensacola, Florida, in a Mooney 252. Here’s what he had to say about one of the […]

A two-man team from Oklahoma City was in town last month with the “live” portion of the FAA’s designated pilot examiner renewal seminar. Half of the mandatory training happens online, but we still get eight hours in one of those hotel meeting rooms; if the air conditioning is cold enough and the coffee strong and […]