Search Results for: general aviation inc

Last month in this space, I discussed the FAA’s plans to close scores of control towers around the country as part of its reaction to ongoing, manufactured federal budget crises. On April 5, two days before the first round of tower closures was scheduled and as this issue was being finalized, the FAA suddenly announced it would “delay the closures of all 149 federal contract air traffic control towers until June 15.”

Your instrument training was all about the physical tasks of flying approaches, missed approaches and holds. Your CFII didn’t spend a lot of time on en route descents, or an efficient way to get prepared for those close-in, “slam-dunk” procedures…you’d pick up all that with experience flying “in the system” after passing your instrument check ride. At least that was the unspoken understanding. Trouble is, you’ve been flying IFR for a while, even completing a couple of instrument proficiency checks since passing the practical test, but those quick IPCs focused on the same terminal procedures you’ve been flying since your instrument training began, and you’re starting to wonder if there’s an easier, more efficient, better way to get from cruise altitude to the ground.

Like debates on high-wing versus low, discussions of “proper” crosswind techniques stand among those topics that split pilot opinions. Roughly speaking, it’s long seemed that aviators maintain membership in one of three groups: One group favors flying crabbed approaches and departures. Another insists the wing-low, upwind-gear-first technique works best. The final group recognizes values in both and offers an answer often irritating to members of the other two groups: It depends, they say. Pilots should be competent enough to embrace either solution to crosswind transitions, employing the technique best for the time, the place and the aircraft.

The ailerons of my homebuilt aircraft, Melmoth 2, are quite similar to those of a 1918 Fokker D.8. You would think that a great deal might have changed in nine decades, but apparently not. Perhaps it’s true, if not in biology then at least in aviation, that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” — that is, the development […]

After my article on overcoming go-around hesitation was published in the November 2012 issue of Flying, I received a message from Dr. Martin Smith about a study he and his associates at Presage Group Inc. conducted in conjunction with the Flight Safety Foundation. The goal of the study was to try to determine how commercial […]

From paper charts to satellites in space, Flying’s Top 50 Navigation Innovations counts down to the single most noteworthy navigation innovation of all time.

Aviation groups and many members of Congress are reacting negatively to the Obama Administration’s budget plan for fiscal year 2014, slamming the proposal for once again including a provision for a $100-per-flight user fee. The White House’s user fee proposal appears to have little chance of making it into a final budget package after 223 […]

Once again the White House’s annual budget proposal calls for a $100 per-flight user fee on certain general aviation aircraft. While talk of user fees used to send chills through the industry, this time around the reaction has been one of confident resolve rather than fear. Here’s what’s changed. In the last few years the […]

Merely one week after Pipistrel first cranked the 210 hp Lycoming engine on the four-seat Panthera, the company announced that it has completed the airplane’s first flight. With support provided by the Slovenian Armed Forces, test pilot Mirko Anžel and his co-pilot Sašo Knez took off from the Airport of Cerklje ob Krki, Slovenia, the […]

On the heels of the introduction of a new line of avionics for the experimental and LSA market, Garmin has received Technical Standard Order (TSO) authorization for two new active traffic systems for the general aviation market, the GTS 825 Traffic Advisory System (TAS) and the GTS 855 Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS […]