Search Results for: maintaining your airplane

We all know—or should know—that an airplane’s wing stalls at its critical angle of attack. While that value varies from plane to plane and wing to wing, once that value is exceeded, the stall occurs, every time. What happens next depends on a variety of factors, including aerodynamic loading, attitude, bank angle, power and control […]

Frenchman Henri Fabre’s name might not ring a bell to most people. But it just might to pilots operating aircraft that use lakes and rivers as their runways. In 1910, Fabre was credited with the first flight of a powered seaplane at Martigues near Marseille, France. Oddly, Fabre was not even a pilot when he […]

I presented a webinar recently about techniques for flying stabilized approaches. During the question-and-answer period, one of the viewers asked me for a technique for flying a traditional non-precision approach profile, that is, a steep descent from the final approach fix (FAF) to leveling off at the minimum descent altitude (MDA) and flying level until […]

Aviation is a numbers-oriented activity. Sure; we can more or less safely operate an aircraft by disregarding some of them, but if we intend to aviate with some degree of reliability and repeatability—not to mention professionalism—we need to do it precisely, which means using some metric against which to measure our performance and the airplane’s. […]

According to the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA), there are about 2,700 flights that cross the world’s oceans every day. When you’re halfway between continents and your airplane suffers an in-flight emergency, sometimes the only option is to ditch in the angry ocean below. Surviving this kind of “blue water ditching” was the subject of […]

When I earned my instrument rating many years ago, it was common to add the notation “No SIDS, No STARs” in the comments block of an IFR flight plan. This was primarily because these procedures were published in a separate book from instrument approaches at the time, and it wasn’t common for private operators to […]

I enjoy reading your journal. I just read your article, “Steep Turns,” in the September issue. Although it is well-written, I have an issue about the description that the horizontal lift component “actually” turns an airplane on page 9.  As written in “Emergency Maneuver Training” by Rich Stowell, the primary turn control is done by elevator. […]

While the COVID-19 pandemic raged around us, I was standing in our approach control’s radar room and my supervisor had just taken a call from our overlying center. Eyebrow raised, I asked, “Bad news?” “Center took a COVID hit,” my sup said, “So they’re closing down overnight for cleaning.” Controllers normally work in close quarters, […]

Aerodynamic wing stall accidents have been a concern since the canard was removed around 1910. Approximately 40 percent of General Aviation fatal accidents are due to loss of control with the majority of those being from stalls. One element of stall awareness training that’s not often taught is the details of sensors used to detect […]

One of the reasons pilots so frequently lose control in flight is they forget—or never were properly instructed—that an airplane’s published stall speed applies only when at gross weight, in a specified configuration and in level, 1G flight. Perhaps they believe that as long as their airspeed indicator shows a value above the bottom of […]