Search Results for: general aviation inc

This maze of hallways is the archives of aviation’s greats—not the Stupid Pilot Tricks Repository. We’re awed by images of the Montgolfier brothers and their good sense to launch the world’s first flyable aircraft with a sheep, rooster and duck before stocking its basket with humans (who weren’t themselves). While they were brilliant, Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier […]

The Terminal Aerodrome Forecast, TAF, is a staple of aviation weather, known to almost every pilot. During my own Air Force career, I composed hundreds of TAFs for pilots not too different from you. In this article we’ll take an inside look at this tool in a more readable format than you’re probably used to. […]

You might have heard the old adage, “The flight cannot be cleared for departure until the gross weight of the paperwork exceeds that of the aircraft.” While cynical, this reference to all the required processes, rules, and regulations makes a good point. Regulations and procedures for pilots largely mirror those of ATC, but these might […]

Recently, a subscriber sent me a note to ask about the legality of departures into bad weather. At first, this seemed like a rather simplistic question, but as I dug, the back story made it a reasonable discussion. That pilot had a career in the military. As with most large bureaucracies, its operations were rather […]

ELECTRIC WINGSUIT FLOWN Electric propulsion is showing up in every corner of aviation and an Austrian skydiver has launched an electrically boosted wingsuit. Peter Salzmann and BMW collaborated on the contraption that will allow a wingsuit pilot to climb briefly and reach speeds of up to 186 mph. Salzmann leapt from a helicopter at 10,000 […]

If there’s any upside to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic—any at all—it may be that many aircraft cockpits are cleaner than they’ve ever been. As a direct result of the pandemic and related guidance from public health officials, it’s not a stretch to suggest that crewed, rental and fleet aircraft of all sizes and types are […]

A December 1, 2020, article published by Bloomberg Quint, “Rusty Pilots Making Flying Errors Is Next Aviation Headache,” highlighted a September 15, 2020, event involving an Indonesian Airbus A330 that experienced a runway excursion on landing. According to the article, an investigation found “the pilot had flown less than three hours in the previous 90 days. […]

Aviation is a numbers-oriented activity. Sure; we can more or less safely operate an aircraft by disregarding some of them, but if we intend to aviate with some degree of reliability and repeatability—not to mention professionalism—we need to do it precisely, which means using some metric against which to measure our performance and the airplane’s. […]

As this issue was being finalized in early December, it was hard to avoid general-media stories about forthcoming Covid-19 vaccines. While the pandemic’s end may not be around the corner, it seems there’s at least a road map to such a goal, even if it might take most of 2021 to reach it. Since I’ve […]

Daher, Safran, and Airbus announced on December 10 they had completed the preliminary design review phase for the consortium’s EcoPulse Demonstrator, which uses a distributed hybrid-electric propulsion system. The review “freezes” the aircraft’s configuration, and it positions the demonstrator for its next steps, which include mounting Safran motors in preparation for the first flight. The […]