Search Results for: maintaining your airplane

As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the United States Air Force’s most senior uniformed officer, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. is responsible for the organization, training and equipping of 689,000 active-duty National Guard, Reserve and civilian forces serving in the US and overseas. A military adviser to the secretary of defense, […]

Many years ago, a friend landed and left his Cessna 172 in Louisville, Kentucky, because of weather, an hour and half away from our home-base airport in Madisonville. He was far too busy in his business to go back and fly it home anytime soon. As a newly minted 17-year-old private pilot, I jumped at […]

Each month in the back of this magazine, we chronicle recent accidents we hope are of interest to readers. A glance at a random month’s entries likely would reveal that a substantial portion of them involve total or partial failure of a piston single’s engine. Yes, there’s selection bias involved—we typically try to highlight the […]

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. Some of the details may vary here and there, but the general plot is always the same. I had a morning departure time, right in that sweet spot where you are going to hit rush hour traffic no matter what time you leave. We rush to get […]

We look through the glass and what do we see?

“When should I begin training to become a professional pilot?” That’s a question that regularly pops up from people new to the aviation industry. The best answer is, “Now is a pretty good time.” That rather-blatant nudge to get moving is meant to highlight the lag time between a person’s ­commitment to the profession and […]

An in-depth look at the accidents that result from loss of power on departure.

There’s normal, and then there’s normal. Which is to say that while much of aviation relies on routine procedures and aircraft configurations, among other things, there are exceptions to most norms. For example, the FAA long ago declared a “normal” landing to be one with an airplane’s wing flaps, if any, fully deployed. That’s not […]

Which is safer, a 10,000-hour pilot who has flown only 20 hours in the last year or a 200-hour pilot who has flown frequently in the last month?

In the March 2021 issue, I discussed the need to restructure the way we teach flying, to focus ab initio training on developing habits that don’t have to be unlearned as one progresses through flight training and into advanced ratings and operations. The classic example is developing in students the habit of using airspeed as […]