Pilot Proficiency

When an accident’s cause is not easily found.

Here’s a situation you’ve likely experienced: You drive 45 minutes to the airport, walk out to your airplane and start unpacking your flight bag. As you go through your normal preflight routine and organize your gear in the cockpit, you experience that sinking feeling and realize you left something behind. If you had to pick […]

We, being human, are ill-disposed to wasting shoe leather crossing the street in search of wisdom. But, being pilots, we enjoy the pursuit of knowledge. This, as Aesop said, may easily be both hidden and discovered in anecdote. All know of the soldier’s first parachute jump, of his failure to pull the rip cord, and […]

It was a gorgeous morning on the Florida Panhandle: The cold-front storms of the previous night had scoured out the scud and haze, and the Gulf of Mexico sparkled brilliantly under my left wing. I banked a little to the right, easing inland from the hotel-lined beach, as I eyed the Pensacola airport a few […]

Some ’specially fun flying recently: a ride in EAA’s B-17, a DC-3 I brought back home to Hamilton, Ohio, from where it had flown for many years as a freighter, and then a Cessna 195 I took from Hillsboro, Ohio, to Port Clinton on Lake Erie. I rode back to Lunken Airport from Hamilton in […]

Things are getting busy approaching Trenton, Tennessee, Gibson County (KTGC), even though its not that bad. But the skies are grey enough to make you squint as you enter the overcast. Youve also entered, as youll soon find out, the murky realm of the regs. A cold crust of rime clings to the aluminum and probably the antennas, so youre anxious to get into that toasty hangar at TGC. Worse, the suns going down and the gyros acting up. So any shortcuts (safe and legal, of course) would be great right about now.

During low index patterns, these frontal systems can be quite deep, even extending into southern California, producing cold-core lows and showery weather. This also tends to allow moisture to circumvent the Sierra Nevadas through the Mojave Desert into the Great Basin, causing snowstorms eastward into Utah. These deep storm systems are particularly favored during El Nio years (the pattern this winter is neither El Nio nor La Nia), but they can occur in any season and theyll definitely have impacts on your flying plans.

The Citation Jet Pilots Association met in Colorado Springs, Colorado, this past September, and I went to see what it was all about. With a recently purchased 19-year-old CJ1 in our hangar, we finally qualified for membership. Going required a certain suspension of skepticism on my part. I am not a natural joiner of groups. […]

You’re not a pilot unless you are flying. Maybe you once were a pilot, or are one in spirit, or perhaps continue to be a pilot on paper (compliant in satisfying regulatory definitions). But in my eyes, until you pull back on the yoke and defy gravity’s ancient pull, you aren’t one. I did not […]

Every instrument pilot should understand the process of filing, getting a clearance, and then flying an IFR flight plan. But why does it occasionally seem that ATC makes things complicated? Say you’ve filed a straightforward Point A to B then C. But then you’re cleared from Point A to B then to X, Y, Z, and only finally to Point C. Why are these extra fixes in the flight plan? Where did they come from? Why this today instead of an intermediate RNAV fix that you usually get?