Pilot Proficiency

It happens to be my lot in life as a pilot to get to fly regularly a couple of routes that take me through the most active thunderstorm areas in the country. These routes, from central Texas to northern Kansas and, again, from central Texas to Florida, not only point me in the direction of […]

Until the recent slowdown in travel because of the COVID-19 virus, Branson, Missouri, was a top destination in the Ozarks for families with kids, boasting a host of live shows, restaurants, golf courses, museums, hiking trails and much more. While everyone hopes the lull in flying to getaways such as Branson will be short, the […]

I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, this past winter to direct a TV series about Evel Knievel’s life. The script has some fun aviation moments in it. In the 1970s, Knievel had a pair of matching Learjets. We were re-creating his livery on the exteriors of two older—but still working—medevac Lears. We were going to […]

Unless your flying is limited to local sightseeing in good weather, chances are you’ve used winds aloft charts at some point. For many commercial and military pilots, they’re a staple of the preflight weather briefing, and they’re easily found on sites like aviationweather.gov.  These charts are constructed by weather centers at a series of designated […]

Category I ILS approaches, long our low-weather mainstay, offer us minimums as low as 200 feet above the touchdown zone with RVR 1800 feet or higher. That’s low, but as it develops, not as low as you can go. CAT II approach approval opens about 160 public CAT II approaches to GA, easing access to […]

Twenty-five years ago, a Seattle-area pilot tried to do his mother a favor. He would take her to visit a friend on the other side of the Cascades. Their route would go through the Snoqualmie Pass, which, on the day of the trip, was unfortunately beset by fog and low-lying clouds. The pilot was instrument-rated, […]

I learned to surf in 1996. A friend taught me the basics at Pacific Beach in San Diego. Enthralled by the sport, I would go out every moment I got the opportunity. I did not care what the conditions were like. I’d paddle out in 2-foot chop just as eagerly as 5-foot glass. Snow on […]

Olive Branch—in Mississippi— might not be a city that easily rolls off the tongue of pilots everywhere, but as the crow flies, Olive Branch Airport (KOLV) is just 26 miles from Memphis International (KMEM), home base to package-delivery giant FedEx. That airline alone adds some 450 daily operations to KMEM. But KMEM’s nearly 230,000 annual operations include plenty of […]

My relationship with the mountains began on hikes with my family, camping trips up into the farthest corners of Glacier National Park that could be reached with a 7-year-old (me) and a toddling 4-year-old (my little brother) in close formation. We took what we could carry in our little packs—supplemented heavily with the resources my […]

Gallipolis is a town in extreme southeastern Ohio—not to be confused with the World War I battle site on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey. This one got its name in 1790, when some Frenchmen (“Gallia”) established a village or city (“polis”) across from where West Virginia’s Kanawha River joins the mighty Ohio. They’d been discovered […]