Search Results for: general aviation inc

Anyone who’s picked up the phone to obtain a weather briefing from an FAA Flight Service Station (FSS) in recent weeks has discovered the ongoing consolidation by federal contractor Lockheed Martin (LockMart) isn’t going so well.

I notice the article “Top Five Engine Myths” (March 2007) has not generated any controversy. Please let me provide a remedy. I am a retired performance engineer for Pratt & Whitney, having worked on experimental jet engines. After a second career as an A&P/IA with a flight school and Part 135 charter operation, Im now retired again. Im also an Instrument-rated Commercial pilot.

Back in 1996, Congress decided subsequent FAA Administrators should have a five-year minimum term. Supposedly, this decision was made to prevent political meddling in the agencys affairs and ensure the FAA would make the “right” decisions. Right. This was, for what its worth, the same law removing from the agencys mandate the concept of promoting aviation.

At first glance the newly certified Mooney Ovation3 looks like just another Mooney (which, granted, is a little like saying “just another Porsche.”) But behind the familiar long-body lines are a couple of big changes. Even before the Ovation3 came along, these airplanes were fast, and over the past few years they’ve gotten faster, and […]

For years, Flight Service Stations have been the “Rodney Dangerfields” of general aviation: they got no respect, no respect at all. Some of that began to change in 2005, when Lockheed Martin took over operation of 58 Automated Flight Service Stations from the FAA. Slowly, things began to get better: Wait times shortened, briefers tried harder, fewer flight plans got lost. In recent months, I noticed what I consider substantial improvement at the Leesburg (Va.) facility and others.

“There’s a reacting side of the brain and a thinking side of the brain,” insists Clinton Anderson in his training DVDs. Anderson is a “horse whisperer” who demonstrates his Downunder Horsemanship on the RFD cable channel and in his series of DVDs. I’ve been using Anderson’s training techniques to work with Miss Biscuit, my three-year-old […]

A full page ad in the morning paper invited readers to a showing and reception for one of the new small jets (VLJs) at Million Air Cincinnati on the following Tuesday evening. It sounded like fun so I called the 800 number for an invitation. The young salesman was cordial but seemed intent on establishing […]

Now that I’ve officially become a senior citizen it’s probably long past time for me to decide what I want to do with my life. I could have used some help deciding when I was younger. For 21 years, Columbia-Greene Community College has been helping students consider their options by hosting a “career day” for […]

“After reading Dick Karl’s article ‘The Practiced Art of Airline Safety’ in the October issue, it becomes obvious that the best way to instantly improve the safety of flying and the medical profession is to ban Dick Karl from practicing either of them. I would not want him performing surgery on my open chest or […]

A 473-hour instrument-rated private pilot, alone in a fully fueled Cirrus SR22-G2, took off from Reno, Nevada, early on a Sunday evening in February 2005. The sun had set half an hour earlier; the moon, above a layer of clouds, was a mere sliver. He had filed an IFR flight plan via Truckee and Sacramento […]