Search Results for: general aviation inc

The White House’s proposal to privatize our nation’s air traffic control system is nothing new. The original en route air traffic control system developed in the late 1920s, in fact, was owned and operated by the airlines. But by the late 1930s, after a number of high-profile airline crashes, the federal government and airlines jointly […]

I hadn’t seen Jerry Kemp in a while, but an email from him recently brought a flood of memories and a delightful (in retrospect) reminiscence about this hero and friend, an FAA safety meeting and a place called Bristol Village in rural southeastern Ohio. By the late 1980s, I’d swapped my job as principal operations […]

Among the various fascinating denizens of the air sharing our friendly skies, there are a great many creatures of habit — but perhaps none quite to the degree of the common airline pilot. This species, to which I belong, takes great pride and comfort in its everyday routines, the highly scripted rituals of flight and […]

I had to cancel a flight the other day and go airline, and I was mad at myself. Not because I made the wrong decision — a cutoff low aloft meant the weather along my route was really ugly — but because my priorities were out of whack. I had squeezed flying into a narrow […]

The General Aviation Manufacturers Association and Build A Plane‘s annual Aviation Design Challenge for high school students has come to a close, culminating in the selection of Olney High School from Olney, Texas as the winner. Four students from the school, along with one teacher and one chaperone, will soon travel to Arlington, Washington, to […]

In written testimony delivered yesterday to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, NBAA president and CEO Ed Bolen said the best solution to squelch the relentless in-fighting over the future of the U.S. air traffic control system is to set aside the idea of privatization altogether and simply find a better solution. Bolen, as well […]

When I got my private at age 18, I was flying a Cessna 152 off a pasture. It didnt take much to memorize the steps necessary to get the old girl started: I followed the old adage, Kick the tires and light the fires. When the checklist said, Gas on fullest tank, it was pretty easy, since the 152s fuel selector is an on/off affair and always draws from both tanks. In my 18-year-old brain, the checklist seemed like an unnecessary list of the obvious. It either directed me to change the airplanes configuration to what it already was in or change it to one that was patently obvious given the stage of flight. In short, my early experiences did not help me build the best of habits.

Over the last couple of decades, theres been a growing realization within aviations training and safety arenas about situational awareness. The conversation generally involves ways to enhance situational awareness in the cockpit and often concentrates on technological solutions, like moving maps, or displaying real-time traffic and weather. The presumption is that greater situational awareness is better and that all of us have at least some measure of this characteristic.

I was motoring home from New Orleans a couple of months ago, sliding eastbound along the shoreline, IFR at 9000 feet. After a controller gave me a frequency change for the next controller, I switched over and listened, which I always do when coming onto a new frequency. The first transmission I heard was a pilot saying something like …and we have four hours of fuel aboard. Hmmm. In my experience, its rare for anyone to talk about their fuel availability on an ATC frequency unless theres an emergency in progress and ATC wants to know souls and endurance.

The General Aviation Manufacturers Association released its quarterly aircraft shipment report showing a mix of ups and downs for the market. While total billings dropped by 12 percent, from $4.63 billion in the first quarter of 2016 to $4.09 billion this year, the report was far from bleak. The total number of airplanes delivered in […]