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The FAA has released the medical requirements for the Pilots Bill of Rights 2 (PBOR2) and quite frankly, I think it is a home run for general aviation, pilots, and the AOPA who fostered it through Congress. The new program is called BasicMed that is technically the FAAs implementation of medical requirements in the PBOR2 portion of the FAA Extension, Safety, and Security Act of 2016 known (of course) as FESSA. The final rule from the FAA, released January 10, 2017, and effective May 1, 2017, can be found on the FAA web site, FAA.gov.

Self-evaluation can be an important component of a pilots ongoing training and currency efforts. If we dont know how well we did on a given flight, how will we know what to practice on the next one? How will we know how well well shoot an ILS when it counts if we cant manage one in severe clear on a nice day? Presuming you, like me, always want to fly with the fewest mistakes, some kind of self-evaluation is both necessary and appropriate. How you go about it is key.

By now, U.S.-based flight instructors and training organizations should be fully up to speed on last years formal implementation of the airman certification standards (ACS), which is designed to eventually replace all practical test standards (PTS). For now, only the private pilot and airplane instrument rating checkrides employ the ACS, but more are coming. The new standards went into effect June 15, 2016-if youre in the primary training environment and dont know about the ACS, you havent been paying attention.

Winter is upon us. This doesnt mean we have to strike a baleful note of doom, though it should remind many of us that winter generally brings more cloudy skies to North America. In 2015, an Alaska-based climate blogger, Brian Brettschneider, examined cloud coverage data from selected weather stations in the National Climate Data Center’s (NCDC) Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN). He created a series of maps showing the cloudiest parts of the U.S., the distribution of cloud cover by month and the cloudiest months for each first order reporting station.

Lately, the general aviation community has focused, quite correctly, on the very preventable loss-of-control in-flight type of accident (LOC-I). Too many people somehow manage to bend an airplane-or worse-each year basically because they forget to fly it. Its a broad category, and includes a mix of accident causes, from low-level maneuvering, to VFR-into-IMC and to multi-engine training operations. As complex and dynamic as the LOC-I category is, it most assuredly doesnt include the full range of things pilots do to make the accident reports. For example, a look at the other category of pilot-related accidents, as broken down by the AOPA Air Safety Institute (AOPA ASI) in its 25th Nall Report, highlights some other areas where pilots regularly make contributions to the aviation-accident records. Here are five of them, not related to LOC-I.

One of the downsides of automation is that the pilot often is removed from the control feedback loop. In other words, he or she isnt sensing what the airplanes control feedback is saying. When manually making a certain control input, the pilot receives instant feedback-through the control system and the instruments-on whether the airplane is responding as expected. All that is lost when Otto is flying, even though the instruments may tell us everything is nominal.

The Ocean Reef Vintage Weekend, which started in 1994, attracts dozens of vintage airplanes, cars and yachts. The collection continues to grow each year. For the first few years, only a handful of airplanes flew into the airstrip at the private Key Largo, Florida, community. For the most recent event, in early December, 2016, nearly […]

With flashing lights, smoke, and fanfare, Cirrus Aircraft rolled out their first Vision Jet for customer delivery, in late December. The FAA in December finalized new aircraft certification rules for general aviation that are expected to help the industry bring new designs and technology to market more quickly and cheaply. A chartered RJ85 crashed in Cerro Gordo, Colombia, while flying a holding pattern near its destination airport, on November 28. It might have made sense to the company, but nonetheless many aviators found it shocking to see Cessna dispose of its unsold Skycatcher stock, crushing the brand-new airplanes complete with their zero-time Continental engines.

Airspace redesign, increased use of RNAV and optimum climb/descent profiles complicate and clutter STARs and SIDs. Procedure complexity previously stemmed from complicated lateral paths. Course changes and cross-radials required frequencies to be tuned and OBS knobs spun like the man behind the curtain. (Im supposed to identify each of these stations too?) The HAARP arrival into LaGuardia is an example: tracking outbound on Kingston R-203, the number two radio is set on Deer Park R-338, then number one on the Pawling R-211 or Huguenot R-107 to identify BASYE intersection.

Periodically, NASAs Aviation Safety Reporting System publishes many of the most meaningful ASRS report submissions that relate to various specific aspects of aviation, such as weather, near-midairs, GPS and the like. We looked at these selected reports covering Air Traffic Control, with a view toward lessons we can learn in dealing with ATC, better practices we can follow, and generally ways to do things better. Youll note two recurring themes. The first is incorrect pilot readbacks of controller instructions and controllers not catching the mistake. The second is pilots turning incorrectly left, right or to the wrong heading, or similar errors with altitude, as in this first case below.