Pilot Proficiency

I’m a lucky guy. When I ask someone to fly along with me to hone my procedures, I can turn to Flying contributing editor Tom Benenson. Tom is one of the most experienced pilots you’ll find, and has made a career seeking out detailed strategies for flying in the IFR system, so his input is […]

One of my personal goals this year is to follow one of the directives issued at the recent Women in Aviation International Conference and promote general aviation in my local community. Lo and behold, as often happens when you put goals out into the universe, opportunities seem to appear. Last night I attended my first […]

I have no history with hot air balloons, but plenty with Wacos since my father was an avid restorer of the antique airplanes. And I even had hopes of learning to fly my dad’s mainstay, Big Red. That was before he and two others in the airplane went down into Lake Apopka (I have yet […]

My last day at Sun ‘n Fun was Saturday. And what a day it was. It might be that my colleagues here at Flying, who, between them, have thousands of hours logged in fancier airplanes, many type ratings under there belts and incredible wealth of knowledge about flying — heights, granted, that I will never […]

My morning began with a smile. Bonnier Staff Photographer Jon Whittle and I headed out to Fantasy of Flight (fantasyofflight.com) to get some shots of the Splash In for the Sun n Fun 2010 photo gallery we’ve been posting at flyingmag.com this week. We had been shooting the first two days of Sun ‘n Fun […]

There will be times in your IFR flying (or VFR with flight following) when you’re expecting some love from your controller, but you wind up feeling like a neglected child. Sometimes the frequency is busy; sometimes the controller is on another frequency or the land line setting up a handoff. Either way, you want to […]

Next week’s Sun ‘n Fun event unofficially kicks off the 2010 fly-in season, and Lakeland Linder Regional Airport (KLAL) will be buzzing. For many pilots, it’s just too intimidating to even consider flying in to such a hornets’ nest. Maybe most of their flying is in rural areas where they seldom see another airplane in […]

Some people are naturally well organized and others — just aren’t. I place myself mostly in the ‘aren’t’ category, and over the years, I’ve adjusted my flying style to accommodate that element of my personal style. In the late 1980s, my friend and former colleague at Flying Eric Weiner (now the author of a bestseller […]

Blending a mix of aircraft into a traffic pattern can sometimes be a real trick — especially at busy non-tower airports. The key is to be considerate of the other aircraft around you and to try and blend in with them — speed being the usual issue. There are really two scenarios here — slow […]

The title of a short Associated Press article in a USA Today dated Nov. 30, 2009, said, “Pilots flying on empty baffle NTSB.” Tom Haueter, director of the NTSB’s Office of Aviation Safety, was quoted as saying, “It’s surprising to me that there’s a group of pilots who will knowingly push it, thinking, ‘I can […]