When I made my living flying airliners, someone from the non-flying world would occasionally ask me, Doesnt it bother you to have to make all of those decisions?My answer was always the same. I never have to make any decisions. All of the decisions have already been made and are written down in a book. Well, that wasnt completely true. I got to decide what I wanted to eat (once I got to be a Captain) and when I wanted to eat.
With the exception of a crazed pilot bent on suicide and/or mass murder, nobody wants their airplane to hit the ground at speed. Why, then, do we continue to pilot our aircraft under control all the way to the point of impact with Mother Earth? Pros and students alike are guilty, and perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this is that these oft-fatal accidents are all preventable.The answer begins with proper pre-flight planning to evaluate the risks and your performance. The rest is having the discipline to follow through. This may all seem obvious, but we keep crashing, so lets see what we can do about it.
Landing on a beach or on a beautiful remote backcountry airstrip in an airplane equipped with fat tires. Flying in formation with some of the top airshow performers in the world doing loops and rolls in a sleek single-engine jet or a roaring round-engine T-6. Testing out the capabilities of some of the coolest new […]
Significant advances in aviation technology usually arrive not with a brilliant flash of light and poof of smoke but over many years, in a slow, inexorable evolution of products that we sometimes don’t even recognize as signifying a momentous change until, suddenly, the next incredible new capability is in our midst. When we stop to […]
The GAJSC, like its airline counterpart the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST), was established in the 1990s. According to its Web site, GAJSC works to improve general aviation safety through data-driven risk reduction efforts that focus on education, training, and enabling new equipment in general aviation aircraft. The CAST has been spectacularly successful in its efforts, as evidenced by an 80-percent reduction in airline fatal accident rates.
The FAA, NTSB and the aviation community have spent a lot of time and effort analyzing how and why pilots lose control of their aircraft, historically the leading cause of fatal general aviation accidents. A recent report by the FAA/industry General Aviation Joint Steering Committee (GAJSC-see the sidebar on the opposite page), closely looked at the reasons why, highlighting dozens of recommended mitigations to reduce loss-of-control (LOC) accidents. Many of its recommendations have great value.
Check out some of the aircraft featured at Europe’s annual general aviation show held in Friedrichshafen, Germany.
With his harebrained landing of a gyrocopter on the Capitol lawn to hand deliver hundreds of protest letters to Congress, mailman Doug Hughes has put a new twist on the expression “going postal.” The FAA says it’s launching a full-scale investigation of the unauthorized flight. AOPA quickly labeled the stunt “unacceptable.” Most everybody else, meanwhile, […]
I could feel my mind going deeper and deeper into a fog. No matter how hard I tried to focus, I couldn’t seem to make sense of the basic problems that I had been tasked with. What is the sum of 15 plus 4? The question wasn’t hard, but it took all of my brainpower […]
Get the latest stories & special offers delivered directly to your inbox.
SUBSCRIBE
