Pilot Proficiency

Airlines this week diverted a handful of flights on polar routes to avoid communications disruptions from a solar radiation storm that scientists said was the strongest to hit the Earth since 2005. The geomagnetic storm caused minor disruptions for U.S. airlines, with Delta saying it altered the routes of some Asia-bound flights to more southerly […]

(February 2012) At first glance the NTSB report seemed like a typical “non-instrument-rated pilot takes off into IMC conditions” accident. The pilot had accumulated close to 400 hours during the five years since he had earned his private pilot certificate, mostly in the accident airplane. He was eager to depart on a trip that he […]

Weather conditions make for a turbulent ride.

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 […]