Pilot Proficiency

I was surprised when I read recently that many new airline pilot job applicants struggle with decoding basic metar weather reports. It would seem to me that if you’ve done enough flying to reach the interview stage with a commercial carrier, you would have interpreted hundreds if not thousands of metars along the way. Maybe […]

Once again, a new flying bug has bit me. This time the bite came from a bug-like aircraft – a helicopter. I had a chance to fly a Eurocopter AS350B3, also known as an AStar, the same type of helicopter that landed on top of Mt. Everest a few years ago and set an unbeatable […]

It wasn’t many years ago that the idea of using biofuels for flight was dismissed out of hand as a utopian fantasy. The conventional wisdom said we’d never be able to produce enough aviation biofuel to make a difference, and even if we could it wouldn’t matter — biomass-sourced fuel would wreak havoc on the […]

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 Mike McIntee, who has nothing but good things to say about Executive Air at KBIS and how they treat him and his Cessna T206H. Executive Air (KBIS)_ _ […]

The details of the near disaster are chilling. A Cessna 172 and an Embraer Regional Jet at Biloxi-Gulfport International Airport in Mississippi were cleared to take off on runways with intersecting departure paths only moments apart. On departure they missed each other, thank goodness, but only by a couple of hundred feet horizontally and by […]

The first solo flight is undoubtedly a moment that you will never forget. Even though you may have seen the earth from above many times before, the experience of reaching that perspective alone is different. And because it is literally a groundbreaking moment, you’ll want to do everything you can to make it positive and […]

Remember that online petition asking the White House to abandon its $100 per flight user fee proposal? More than 9,000 of you signed it, prompting the government to consider the issue and write a response. Authored by Dana Hyde, a Washington bureaucrat with the bureaucratic-sounding job title Associate Director for General Government Programs for the […]

(January 2012) Some time back, Congress decided that the FAA’s goals were just downright incompatible. How could a federally mandated regulatory agency “encourage and develop civil aeronautics” while enforcing the regulations and exercising its authority to levy fines and suspend or revoke certificates? So guess which functions were eliminated? Washington also reminded the agency that […]

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 “Randy” Olson, who recently flew one of Alexandria Aviation’s Piper Warriors and has nothing but good things to say about the experience. Alexandria Aviation (KAXN) Alexandria, Minnesota […]

(January 2012) The history of powered flight is short. So short that A.L. Ueltschi has lived during most of it. Ueltschi is, of course, the founder of FlightSafety International. The company is perhaps one of the most emblematic of the exponential growth of aviation; as airplanes became more sophisticated and pilots were asked to understand […]