Search Results for: general aviation inc

Sunday mornings at the Waypoint Cafe at the Camarillo Airport (KCMA) in California are generally bustling with hungry visitors eagerly awaiting a seat while drooling over the delicious menu. But on the Sunday in early May when I met Doug King, Epic Aircraft’s CEO, outside the restaurant, it was deserted despite crystal-clear blue skies. The […]

Once again we delve into aviation accidents. The official 2019 numbers won’t be out until November, but the 2018 NTSB release showed there were 1347 accidents with 393 fatalities. The vast majority of these, as we might expect, were general-aviation accidents, with a sizable number of them due to weather. The airlines, charter operators, and […]

Many of life’s distractions are enjoyable, but cockpit distractions can have tragic consequences. For years, the NTSB has made “Eliminate Distractions” one of their Ten Most Wanted safety improvements.  In Ernest Gann’s Fate is the Hunter, he describes a night approach as a DC-2 First Officer while Captain Ross lit matches in front of Gann’s […]

Aviation makes us mission-minded. The whole point of these flying machines is to go somewhere and do something, even if that’s just practice following little black lines on the iPad so we can make pretty pictures on FlightAware. That’s what makes practicing emergency returns so important and so frustrating. It’s not fair having something go […]

While BasicMed was mistakenly called third-class medical reform, it didn’t replace the third-class medical, but it did give pilots another option to fly. It has been popular with pilots who only need a third-class medical, but BasicMed does have some restrictions compared to a third-class medical. Since April 2020, more than 55,000 pilots are flying […]

Simply fly long enough and you’ll eventually make a boneheaded or innocent mistake that gets in ATC’s way. Those may say a Pilot Deviation (PD) is where they “screwed up” or “ATC is blaming me for…” I’ve personally heard it put in many different—often creative—ways; I should keep a list.  Here is how the FAA […]

Turn Off a Satellite? Some FMCs have a satellite deselection function. Some don’t. Why and when should this be used? Pablo Farias Dezontini – São Paulo, Brazil Normally you would never deselect a satellite. The GPS ground monitoring stations will detect a malfunctioning GPS satellite and take that satellite “off the air.” However in the very […]

OWNERS TAKE OVER MOONEY MANAGEMENT Mooney announced in August that a new management group made up of “pilots and Mooney owners” has taken over operations at the Kerrville, Texas plant. The new CEO is Jonny Pollack and he said his top priority is to ensure support for the existing fleet. “Our first and immediate focus […]

A Champion 7ECA Citabria was my first taildragger as well as my first airplane. The first few hours of tailwheel instruction chronicled in my logbook made the score pretty clear—Citabria: 2, me: 0. My instructor always managed to add colorful comments to my logbook to illustrate the at-times-agonizing progress—”Crash and Dash,” he called many of […]

Strange times we are living in. When writing my last column, I wondered aloud if things could get any worse. (I turn in my column two months prior to publication.) As it turns out, they could—and for entirely different reasons than I imagined. In January, I moved to New Mexico to shoot a television show. […]