Pilot Proficiency

A fellow pilot recently recounted the harrowing tale of one of his early solo cross-country flights as a student pilot that inadvertently put him where no pilot wants to be: inside the bowels of a thunderstorm. According to the pilot, the summer haze along his route had cut the visibility to less than five miles, […]

Last week, I flew to McClellan-Palomar Airport, just north of San Diego, California. It reminded me of my long solo cross-country flight as a student pilot. Being all alone in the airplane, far away from home took me way out of my comfort zone, but the experience was priceless. Completing that flight without a hitch […]

(April 2011) AFTER DEPOSITING MY wallet, cell phone, parts of my uniform and various other sundries into the required plastic bins, I walked through the arch of the security magnetometer. I shuddered, fearing an activation of the chirping beep that would force me to succumb to a re-entry. I would then be required to remove […]

(April 2011) THE DESIRE FOR CERTAIN knowledge drives airplane designers to many decimal places, even though a whiff of wind can blow them all away. And so, when finally, after years of procrastinating, I got my homebuilt’s flaps working, I wanted to measure their effect as exactly as I could. No doubt if I had […]

(April 2011) Coincidentally (maybe) I’m writing this on the anniversary of the day Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. He was later declared a heretic by the Diet of Worms, a bunch of church guys who met in a German town with a really funny name. It’s possible that posting […]

The taxi run-in between an Air France A380, the largest passenger airplane in the world, and a regional jet at JFK the other night should remind us all how easy it is to bend some metal when all you’re trying to do is get to the departure end of the runway. These taxi surprises of […]

(April 2011) IT WAS PART 2 OF A MONTH’S worth of airplane (commercial and private) travel, and though I was seated in posh surroundings in the nose of a KLM 747-400 bound from Los Angeles to Amsterdam, the prisoners began to stir. Our departure had been delayed more than four hours. I worried about my […]

(April 2011) AFTER WRITING THREE articles on the subject of fatigue I figured I had pretty much covered that topic. Then I started receiving e-mails and phone calls from Flying readers, more than I have ever received before. It is obvious that fatigue is a critical issue for many people. Paul Reeves described his own […]

(April 2011) IT WAS NOT A BIG MISTAKE. I ended up with damage only to my pride and my reputation. But, I took a shortcut, and I learned about flying from that. I grew up on World War I flying books left in my bedroom bookcase by previous generations. I listened to Dad tell of […]

(April 2011) WEIGHT MATTERS. EVEN in the light-sport aircraft world. As I wrote in last month’s column about the LSA categories, the maximum gross weight is one of the key factors in determining whether or not an aircraft meets the FAA’s LSA definition. How did the FAA come to that final 1,320-pound figure? Well, it […]