Pilot Proficiency

You’re on your Private Pilot checkride and established in a steep turn. Everything is perfect. You’re spot on your altitude and the bank angle is pegged at 45 degrees. It seems easy. You’re thinking: “I’ve got this!” Then the nightmare happens. Your scan moves down to your heading indicator and you realize you’ve already blown […]

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In many regards light airplanes are more forgiving than jets. This is one reason that pilots of jet aircraft are trained to approach each flight in a very regimented fashion. There are just so many different systems in a jet, and if mismanaged some of those systems have the potential to kill you. Flaps and […]

General aviation has a lot of good things going for it. Airplanes have gotten more capable, and wonderful avionics improvements have come along to give us amazing inflight information and make flying much more fun. But these good things tend to be overshadowed by a particularly large dark cloud. In an increasingly risk-averse and litigious […]

I’m wondering: Will Honeywell’s announcement that it’s acquiring airborne satcom system specialist EMS Technologies reignite calls for airlines to transmit live flight-data information rather than relying on what can be obtained from black boxes found at a crash site? Here’s why I ask: Honeywell is the maker of the flight data recorder used aboard doomed […]

We’ve all heard it. “More right rudder!” is such a common command during flight training that some avionics company would probably make a lot of money producing a small device that could transmit the instruction at the push of a button. But just because the most common place for an instructor to address rudder input […]

(June 2011) In the February issue, Robert Goyer reported on a project to convert Cessna Skyhawks to electric power. Many Skyhawks are used as trainers, and training flights seldom last more than 90 minutes; so batteries, though notoriously lacking in stamina, might be an adequate power source for this application. Parenthetically, Robert mentioned that wingtip […]

Most airplanes don’t have rear view mirrors. But that doesn’t mean that you should forget what’s behind you. It’s always worth taking a second to consider where the rear of the airplane is pointed. This applies not only when the propeller is spinning and the airplane is static, but also when you’re taxiing around the […]

Like a lot of pilots who’ve daydreamed about building airplanes or thought about their idea of the perfect general aviation piston single, I used to doodle pictures of aircraft that I hoped I’d design and fly when I got older. If memory serves, most of my efforts looked a lot like Lancair kitplanes: sleek, low […]

(May 2011) I HAD COMMUTED INTO JFK from my home in Florida with plenty of time to spare before my late evening trip to São Paulo. As I opened the door to Operations and walked past the revision room, Rocco Zavaglia was engaged in the mundane chore of wrestling Jeppesen paper in and out of […]