Pilot Proficiency

The key aspect of any standard instrument departure is the word “standard.” SIDs were created to reduce the required radio traffic between air traffic controllers and pilots, as aircraft transition from the terminal to the en route airspace in busy environments such as the one surrounding Van Nuys, California. This past year, KVNY locally handled […]

Did you ever fly out of Meigs Field in downtown Chicago before it closed? It’s one of those airports you will never forget—if you were lucky enough to visit before the painful closure in 2003. But ask just about any pilot today who learned to fly in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and memories […]

I am different when someone is flying with me for the first time. Even more so if that person shows an interest in or fear of aviation. I feel responsible for my passenger’s continued fascination or for assuaging their anxiety. I do this by exhibiting a high level of proficiency from preflight through tie-down. I […]

Imagine this scenario: You jump in your family airplane and depart into a clear blue sky. You’d have to stay aloft for 4.25 years to match the 37,200 hours in flight instructor Field Morey’s logbook. And you’d have to seek out the worst weather along the way to experience what Field has flown through in […]

Three-quarters of the globe behind them, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, now had only the Pacific Ocean left to cross. They took off midmorning from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on July 1, 1937, bound for Howland Island, an 8,200-foot-long, paramecium-shaped speck halfway to Honolulu. A runway had been carved out on the uninhabited […]

Pride is hurt, though not the airplane…this time.

The Terminal Aerodrome Forecast, TAF, is a staple of aviation weather, known to almost every pilot. During my own Air Force career, I composed hundreds of TAFs for pilots not too different from you. In this article we’ll take an inside look at this tool in a more readable format than you’re probably used to. […]

In an airplane, surely cheap thrills are better than costly thrills—but, frankly, a safer atmosphere in the cockpit may be boring thrills. Boredom in an airplane is good. I begin to sound cynical here when, in truth, I feel that our best experiences in airplanes can fall somewhere between serenity and a luminous exaltation. Here […]

A solar eclipse seemed like the perfect excuse for a cross-country flight to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from San Diego with friends in our recently acquired Cirrus SR22T. My close friend Howard was just as excited for the trip as I was. Our less adventurous wives, not so much. My wife protested, “I don’t get it, […]

It was August 15, 2015, the day my two daughters invited me out for breakfast for my 90th birthday. They took me to the EAA gathering held the third Saturday of every month at Marv Skie-Lincoln County Airport in Tea, South Dakota. As we ate breakfast with the local pilots in the main hangar on this […]