Pilot Proficiency

While you need to enlist a certified flight instructor once every couple of years for your biennial flight review, you don’t need to pay a CFI to learn new things about flying. If you connect with other pilots at your flight school or at neighboring hangars, you are likely to learn new things and find […]

The date was Dec. 23, 1943 — I was 21 years old. I was in the rear cockpit of a Fairchild PT-19 primary trainer with a total dual time to date of 10 hours. My instructor was in the front cockpit. The wide-open grass landing strip of Cimarron Field Primary Flight School in Oklahoma was […]

They tell us that weather forecasting is seeing dramatic improvements thanks to new supercomputers capable of making hundreds of trillions of calculations per second. The latest computers in the arsenal of the National Weather Service are now more than twice as fast as they were just a few years ago, enabling far more accurate forecasts […]

I once watched a pilot perform a quickie preflight inspection of a Skyhawk at a flight school and then hop in the airplane and try to taxi out — with the tail still tied down. The red-faced pilot shut down and untied the rope as those of us on the ramp offered words of encouragement. […]

It is not often that I am able to accept an invitation from a reader, but when 27-year-old First Officer Will Romualdo offered me a jumpseat view with Avianca Brazil, I could not refuse. For the last two months, I had been flying the daytime trip to São Paulo. The layover would afford me the […]

Our recently launched gallery Flying Magazine’s “51 Heroes of Aviation” has been a runaway success, but it has not been without controversy. A number of readers have weighed in that we had left off their choice of most inspirational aviation figure — we can’t name names for fear of spoiling the gallery for those of […]

| There’s only one foolproof way to ensure you don’t end up as an accident statistic in yet another stall/spin fatal crash: Avoid stalling in the first place. Yet if the goal is to avoid stalling, why do we spend so much time practicing stalls? After all, 97 percent of stall/spin accidents that start at […]

Airtime on aviation frequencies, whether you are communicating on a clearance, ground, tower, departure, en route, arrival or CTAF frequency, should be kept to a minimum. You need to make yourself understood in a quick, concise manner. You do this by using certain wording that all pilots should be accustomed with. But if you speak […]

Throughout its history, aviation has generated some of the most remarkable figures that ever lived, including those brave pilots who made the first forays into the air and who courageously pushed the bounds of flight in ways previously unimaginable. At the same time, aviation has produced a number of people whose heroism rises above the […]

When Bob Hoff asked me to speak at the Idaho Aviation Expo, my first reaction (after “Wow, I’ve almost never been to Idaho”) was “What will I say to these Idaho aviators who already take off at 5,000 feet msl, fly through rugged terrain into steep, high canyons and land airplanes with huge tires on […]