Search Results for: wright

As you probably know, the movie The Martian concerns an astronaut who gets stranded on Mars and contrives to survive there until rescuers can come to get him. It has a kind of Potemkin village verisimilitude: a facade of scientific-sounding talk concealing ramshackle structures of crossed fingers and nonsense. Screenwriters are not under oath, but unfortunately […]

They were a big Irish family in Hamilton, Ohio. I’m not sure if Bernie or Joe was the oldest, but Art and Bill came along about 10 years later with another brother and three sisters somewhere in between. In 1929, after a neighboring farmer, “Pop” Muhlburger, taught the two oldest boys to fly in his […]

Dear me, I must be a glutton for punishment. Hot on the heels of declaring that “Taildraggers Suck” (not everyone got the tongue-in-cheek humor behind the column’s title or necessarily read any further), I’m about to reach out and grab the third rail of aviation opinion: warbirds. As I recall, Martha Lunken took some serious […]

Reader Durocher went on to point out that many countries have varying levels of Instrument certification/licensing. While each level is permitted some IMC flight, only the most advanced levels get the same capabilities the U.S. offers a private pilot with an instrument rating. The idea is to provide basic instrument flight training without the intricacies of departures and approaches, then permit IMC flight only enroute, with VMC-only take-offs and landings.

The safety consequences associated with procedural noncompliance-failing to correctly perform normal checklists-have become hot button issues within the business aviation community and the NTSB. All general aviation pilots should heed the warnings raised.

The mako shark may not be the biggest, but it is the fastest and one of the most ferocious of all the shark species. Capable of traveling as fast as 60 mph over sustained distances, the mako has been known to spring surprise attacks on humans, though it doesn’t prefer human flesh. Its favorite food […]

When some Connecticut boosters recently dusted off the claim that ­Gustave Whitehead, of the township of Fairfield in that great state, was “first in flight,” I, and I suspect quite a few others, emitted the sigh of jaded déjà vu. These “who was first” arguments have become pretty tedious. Predictably, the few who were stirred […]

On the heels of the controversy about logging time in a simulator, the FAA has given us an InFO that unequivocally provides clear guidance about when we can log an approach. Thats guidance that weve been lacking, so were glad to see it.

For the moment, well begin with a nickel tour of both the ATC and the national aviation weather systems. Naturally, theres some overlap between them. The FAA air traffic control system is one big ol network. The chain of command begins with the ATC System Command Center in Virginia, which provides oversight and coordination between the biggest ATC facilities, the Air Route Traffic Control Centers.

Within the IFR community, there has been much confusion over how and when to log instrument approaches. The FAA extended that confusion to logging approaches in a simulator as we wrote in the December issue, Need a Sim Instructor?