Pilot Proficiency

Much of general aviation activity in piston-powered airplanes is for recreation-the proverbial $100 hamburger ($1000?) on nice sunny weekends. Still, there are many general aviation pilots who fly-using the technical phrase-for the furtherance of business. Were not talking banner tows, flight instruction, skydiving, or true commercial endeavors. Furtherance of business denotes those operations that are only incidental to that business or employment. (14 CFR 61.113)

Writing last month’s Aftermath column about a fatal accident that resulted from the pilot’s mishandling of a balked landing, I reflected that I had never assessed the behavior of my own airplane in that maneuver. As I have said before, my idea of flight testing is to take trips and wait for something strange to […]

“Stalls and spins represent the largest single factor in fatal general aviation accidents.” Surprisingly, this quote wasn’t pulled from the latest FAA news release, but rather from a NASA Langley Research Center newsletter dated April 1977. Forty years later, stall-spins and loss of control remain pinned to the top of the National Transportation Safety Board’s […]

The phone rang and rang. It was well after 11 p.m. in Tampa, Florida, and I was deeply asleep. Though I had spent 40-plus years as a surgeon and was accustomed to calls at any hour, I thought I was done with all that. “I have your patient here,” said a man — a gastroenterologist. […]

On paper, it looks like a very doable day: Depart from your home base of Scottsdale, Arizona (KSDL) in your Cirrus SR22T by 7:30 a.m., fly 224 nm to North Las Vegas Airport (KVGT) for a 10 a.m. business meeting at the Stratosphere, head 100 nm east to check in at your St. George, Utah, […]

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve likely seen some type of anti-texting-while-driving campaign, even where it has not yet been outlawed. While it’s obvious that taking your eyes off the road while driving can lead to collisions, it’s also human nature to multitask — tune the radio, drink coffee or read that “urgent” […]

I can’t really say I know Sarah Rovner, because we’ve never actually met. We’re both airline pilots, we have a bunch of mutual friends in common, we presented at the same aviation conference (one day apart) and we’ve chatted online and on the telephone. But mostly I “know” Sarah because we’re Facebook friends and she […]

Eight of us had flown into Borrego Springs, California, for lunch. As Martha and I helped the folks from Australia back into the airplane and gave them our preflight briefing for the return trip, I explained, “We are about to challenge the air traffic control system a bit. We will pop up in this small […]

With two Cessna 172s, Flyinn had picked us up at the Queenstown Airport after shuttling our bags over from the main terminal to the general aviation side of the field. Jay and Sandy Rud, our good friends from the Chicago area, were still somewhere behind us, navigating the same bumpy sky in the other 172, […]

In August 2015, a Florence, South Carolina, doctor, 51, left his home field early in the morning on a vacation trip whose eventual destination was the Grand Canyon.