Pilot Proficiency

Last summer, my wife and I wanted to visit the Brooks Range in August to hunt Dall sheep. For those not familiar with it, the Brooks Range is a mountain range stretching about 700 miles from western Alaska across the state east to Canada’s Yukon Territory. From where we live in South Central Alaska, it […]

Multitasking is accepted as a given in our modern technology-driven society. Anyone with a teenager has shaken his head at the sight of his child doing homework while listening to music at a loud volume through earphones, and at the same time carrying on multiple texting conversations and surfing the Internet. While a multicore computer […]

Everyone agrees that diesel makes a lot of sense for light GA, but so far there have only been lower- to mid-power options, including models from Thielert, Austro and SMA. One company, Engineered Propulsion Systems (EPS), of New Richmond, Wisconsin, is doing something about this state of affairs by developing an aero diesel, the Vision […]

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 John Moffitt, who recently flew into Salt Lake City International Airport in a Cessna 182. Here’s what he had to say about the airport’s FBO, TAC Air: “Although […]

The crash of Asiana 214, a Boeing 777, at SFO brought to the world’s attention a number of issues that pilots have been talking about for years, most notably the role of automation in safety and its potential unintended negative consequences if pilots become too reliant on it and lose critical hand-flying skills. What issue […]

When flying in busy airspace, frequency changes can happen often, sometimes every few minutes. It is good practice to write down each frequency in case you need to reference it later. The past frequencies may be helpful if for some reason you can’t reach the next controller or, more importantly, if you have a comm […]

The owner of the float-equipped Maule saw it crash. He was there to watch as his friend and a passenger arrived in the airplane. “I witnessed the airplane fly over the field,” he wrote, “and enter a downwind for a landing on Runway 4. As the plane turned from base to final, it banked at […]

With apologies to our vegan readers, we present the most delicious flight plan ever, with waypoints carefully chosen not necessarily to give the best routing but to offer the best life advice, in our humble opinions, that is. The picture was snapped in flight by Cirrus rep Ivy McIvers, who presumably hadn’t had any part […]

I’ve watched “TWA Flight 800” — the much-hyped Epix original documentary that purports to present “new” evidence proving that a missile attack brought down the Paris-bound Boeing 747 over the Atlantic 17 years ago this month. Yesterday I interviewed Hank Hughes, a former NTSB investigator who was involved in the TWA 800 investigation. Here is […]

After our piece last week on the risky nature of airshow flying and the challenging process of improving safety given all the variables (“Airshow Crashes: The Cost of Doing Business? Going Direct, by Robert Goyer), we received a number of emails from our readers, one of whom is John Cudahy, the president of the International […]