Search Results for: Lear 45

When their equipment doesn’t work, pilots need to work a little harder.

I’ve been both a pilot and sailor going on 25 years, but only in the past five years have I taken to regularly crossing large bodies of water on the wing and under sail. Our “small world” gets a whole lot bigger when one traverses the great expanses of salt water that make up 71 […]

It was a beautiful March day in 1976 in South Texas, and I was excited to be flying my Sweet Adeline women’s barbershop quartet from San Antonio to Amarillo, Texas, for our regional barbershop singing contest. My husband and I owned a 1965 Mooney M20C—yes, with a Johnson bar—and we flew it quite a bit […]

Part of preparing for your flight training means making sure you have the right tools with you—whether your day’s learning session involves time in the sim, ground lessons, or a flight. Here, we assemble a representative kit that will outfit you for training, with a selection of ideas from products we’ve tested over the long […]

After overflying the destination runway, the crew made a steeper-than-normal approach to the 3880-foot-long runway due to terrain. According to the captain, a bump was felt near the threshold during the landing but it was not extreme. As the propellers were reversed, the airplane veered to the right. The crew corrected and the airplane tracked straight for about 2000 feet before veering sharply right, exiting the runway and spinning 180 degrees. Inspection of the runway threshold revealed several four-foot-tall piles of rocks and dirt.

Its an aviation clich that your single engine goes into automatic rough when crossing any significant body of water. To be sure, any engine problem while beyond gliding distance from land is a critical problem, even if you have more than one. When flying a single, its everything. Another clich is that most of us dont bother to analyze the real risks of overwater flying. Any water crossing of any significance-and wed put the Great Lakes, Hawaii and Bahamas in that basket-should be carefully planned to ensure risks are mitigated to acceptable levels. The thing is, both clichs are true more often than not.

It all started with a girl in high school. She was cute, and her father was athletic. He worked in the court system just across from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and at lunchtime he would play a game of squash. I had no idea what that was, but he encouraged me to find out […]

The accident report highlights the ­culture of omertà among professional pilots that keeps them from blowing the whistle on incompetent or unsafe colleagues.

When pilots talk about “the regs,” they refer in general to the portion of the Code of Federal Regulations that govern aeronautical activity. To be specific, the regulations that cover the flying you will do initially as a student and as a certificated pilot live in the 14th volume of the CFR and divvy up […]

I have never parked my airplane after a more or less uneventful flight and been so dismayed at the sight of my wing when I shut down the engine. The flight, approach and landing were ­textbook, with no hint at all of the excitement that could have greeted me that night. No, the ailerons were […]