Search Results for: Lear 45

I started learning to fly at the quaint, waterfront Albert-Whitted Airport in St. Petersburg, Fla., back in the 1980s. It was a great place to fly—beautiful scenery, plenty of options of places to go for practice landings and a reasonably easy airspace set up to facilitate painless statewide cross-country flights. There was one caveat, however. Just […]

There’s normal, and then there’s normal. Which is to say that while much of aviation relies on routine procedures and aircraft configurations, among other things, there are exceptions to most norms. For example, the FAA long ago declared a “normal” landing to be one with an airplane’s wing flaps, if any, fully deployed. That’s not […]

After the primary flight controls—elevator, rudder and ailerons on conventional airplanes—the most frequently used secondary control is pitch trim. That’s because a typical flight in any airplane involves a range of speeds, and pitch trim is used to minimize control forces throughout the operating envelope. Even if the pilot can supply that force, it’s fatiguing. […]

March 2, 2021, Johnstown, N.Y. Cessna P210N Pressurized Centurion At about 0747 Eastern time, the airplane was substantially damaged when its landing gear collapsed on a runway. The solo pilot was not injured. Visual conditions prevailed. While in cruise, the pilot heard an unfamiliar noise that became increasingly louder and he diverted to a nearby […]

To paraphrase a famous American philosopher, predictions can be hard to make, especially when they’re about the future. But seeing the future of the entry-level business jet market 20 years ago, Cessna, with the creation of its seminal CitationJet, must have been watching the future in some late ’80s version of high definition. The airplane […]

Which is safer, a 10,000-hour pilot who has flown only 20 hours in the last year or a 200-hour pilot who has flown frequently in the last month?

Take out your pilot logbook. Have you logged fewer hours this year? A slow economy will do that. Making the decision to pump that disposable income — don’t you love that term? — into your airplane’s fuel tank can be difficult, especially when the disposable-income pool isn’t what it used to be. Yet if airplanes […]

The flight training industry—and aviation as a whole—suffered a blow whose full ramifications still remain to be seen when on April 2, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit made its ruling on Warbird Adventures, Inc., et. al. v. FAA. The ruling declined to reverse an emergency cease-and-desist order meted […]

We usually make these so you can fly them with or without a GPS in your sim, but that’s getting more difficult every day. It’s a GPS world out there. Do you really not have some kind of GPS on your sim? Time to ditch that Windows Vista box and get with the times, my […]

On average, aviators know what a Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) is. However, do they know that depending on the TFR, there are exceptions to the “No Fly” edict? But wait. “Depending on the TFR?” Okay, so there is obviously more than one type, but just how many different TFRs are there? Enough for you to […]