Pilot Proficiency

As you’ve doubtless heard, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B, long spoken of as the surveillance system of the future, is officially here. In late May the FAA published the final rule, though, fortunately, it will be years before you need to do anything about it. If you think of ADS-B as being like a transponder, […]

Until last weekend, the last time I’d had a mettwurst was 1987. What, you might ask, is a mettwurst? Ah. It’s a spicy, little-known relative of the bratwurst that’s only available, as far as I’ve ever determined, in a small radius around southern Ohio. I mention the mettwurst only because sometimes, like the smell of […]

The bright, very bright, sunlight flickered through the Mercury Tracer’s side window making a strobe light effect. The snow was piled high on the sides of the road and the sunlight on the snow was overwhelming my sunglasses. As I drove down the 19-degree hill, in the 19-degree weather, the combination of frost on the […]

I recently received an interesting message from Kevin Recker, who is a senior engineering manager for General Dynamics in Scottsdale, Arizona. The group he leads has built space flight hardware for the Viking missions, the Apollo Program, the International Space Station and the Mars Rovers. The equipment it builds has to be right and can’t […]

Contempt and awe seldom wed, but height may make a match between them. One of the intermittent rewards of flying is the thought-provoking perspective it provides: We look down upon great cities reduced to anonymous gray smudges, or the lights of a solitary car speeding alone at midnight across a canvas of black velvet. The […]

We’ve all been asked, “Isn’t flying little airplanes risky?” And we all have our own answers. If you’ve been using the old chestnut, “It’s safer than driving to the airport,” then you’ve been cheating, at least a little bit. No, statistically, flying light aircraft is much riskier than driving a car. But it is true […]

En route from Miami to Medellin, Colombia, the cockpit satellite phone rang on board Kalitta Air’s 747-200. Dispatch was calling with a request. A competitor’s 747 freighter was experiencing mechanical problems in Bogotá. The competitor would be unable to transport a large load of flowers back to the United States. Would the crew divert into […]

As pilots, we spend much of our training time anticipating emergencies and drilling ourselves on how to react. That’s good, because training means exercising our mental muscle memory. Just as a pro basketball player practices the same three-point shot thousands of times to train his leg, arm and wrist muscles, we ingrain the correct responses […]

At 10,000 feet, the weather opened up and we could see how Anchorage is surrounded by awesome and treacherous terrain. My first look at Alaska was from the window seat of a Boeing, but as a pilot, I could immediately appreciate how this could be a very dangerous place to fly. Later, as I drove […]

July 2010 — Time have changed in aviation, with the advent of computerized avionics, satellite navigation and five-buck-a-gallon avgas, but two things that haven’t changed are that flying costs money and pilots will look for ways to cut those costs. There’s more need to economize than ever before because getting behind the yoke of an […]