Pilot Proficiency

May 1-31 is Learn to Fly month, a month-long effort to help flight training providers attract new pilots. This year, the drum beat is even louder than in the past as the shortage of career pilots continues to make news. Of course, Learn to Fly month doesn’t focus only on career aviators. The efforts will […]

Aircraft ownership is expensive. Between fuel, insurance, hangar or tiedown expenses and possibly a loan payment, by the time you get to the annual inspection, there’s a temptation to do it as cheaply as possible — to do the minimum and skip preventive maintenance actions. Occasionally, aircraft owners will even admit such things to friends […]

Earlier today at the Aero Friedrichshafen expo in Germany, ForeFlight announced that it is introducing its popular aviation app to the European market. The app will be available in Europe later this summer. “We are combining an array of high-quality European data, our Eurocontrol-integrated flight planning and filing capabilities, and a broad suite of navigation […]

Pilots are imperfect by design. We’re human, after all. On any given flight, a pilot is faced with dozens of interrelated decisions that guide the airplane to its destination, hopefully intact and without incident. Most of the time, we make good decisions and our flights end safely, even if we execute some elements of the […]

The days learning about flying from John and Martha King by watching VHS tapes are long gone, but after more than 40 years evolving their pilot courses, King Schools has said goodbye to physical media and is now delivering 100 percent of its pilot courses online. “We have followed two rules that have kept us […]

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University recently asked pilots in a number of certificate categories how well they understand weather information presented to them in written and graphical form. The NTSB in 2014 labeled identifying and communicating elements of hazardous weather as one of its Top 10 safety priorities, calling weather, “a frequent cause or contributing factor to […]

Albert Einstein is reputed as saying that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. In March, Manage Your Electrons, attempted to explain certain concepts and principles without overwhelming readers unfamiliar with batteries and electrical systems. In so doing, we may have violated Einsteins directive, because weve gotten a lot of mail complaining at our oversimplification. So, here is a more detailed explanation of much of what we conveyed in that article.

No matter how carefully you plan, problems seem to appear. But they can be mitigated exercising care in planning, situational awareness, and knowledge. Here, we focus on knowledge to help you gain that essential element of situational awareness to build on the rules of thumb youre originally taught.

For years, V141 from Boston would take you to CELTS and then to DRUNK, which mysteriously became DUNKK around St Patricks Day a few years back. I dont recall any announcement. I wonder if that was a lucid moment of sobriety.

Your favorite phrase as a pilot probably isnt, Go around. You might have been set up on final, aircraft perfectly configured, ready to call it a day, and suddenly youve got to throw all that out and try again. For a controller, the go-around is a last-minute tactic to resolve insufficient clearance or some other unexpected danger. Sure, it fixes an immediate problem, but it instantly creates other risks. Whether ATC initiates it, or you do, its adding complexity for everyone involved.