Search Results for: wright

For those of us flying IFR in locations with a high probability of a white Christmas each year, we often need to recalibrate our aeronautical mindset from summer. We have to switch our weather default from Where are the thunderstorms? to Where is the ice? Winter brings us more challenging preflights, engine starts and airport operations. Even though we are all experienced instrument pilots, its still worth taking a few minutes to think about cold weather operations as we head into the worst of the season.

Continued VFR into IMC accidents have been part of the general aviation accident scene since before I started flying more than 50 years ago. Some headway in reducing these accidents was made when private pilot applicants were required to demonstrate basic instrument proficiency beginning in the early 1960s. Cockpit technology has also improved, with even basic training aircraft equipped for instrument flight and devices such as autopilots and weather data link becoming more prevalent. On the other hand, there is a much higher percentage of high performance aircraft in the general aviation fleet than 50 years ago, and more non-instrument-rated pilots are flying longer distances in higher performance aircraft. As a result, the prevalence of VFR-into-IMC accidents is still very high.

I’m not proud to say it, but last winter got the best of this northern aviator. The face-numbing cold and monochromatic gloom wore at me until I just couldn’t take it anymore. The breaking point came on a brutally raw January morning as I attempted to preheat and start my Piper Pacer after it sat […]

Today, December 17, marks a momentous occasion in aviation history; in 1903, it was the day Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful flight in a powered aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Just 22 years later on this landmark day, barnstormer John Paul Riddle and businessman T. Higbee Embry struck a deal, laying […]

Whenever two or more pilots get together in the same place, the conversation eventually gets around to which of them has the greatest number of flight hours. The yardstick of how much time youve spent aloft is more than just small-scale bragging rights, of course-it also can determine whether youre eligible for a subsequent certificate, or even legal to carry passengers. And then theres the matter of insurance coverage.The simple fact is that most of the aviation world measures how competent we are in the cockpit by how much time we may have spent there. The inference is that high-time pilots are safer, and that low-time pilots are less safe. The fallacy is highlighted if we put someone with 20,000 hours as PIC of a 747 into a piston single and ask him or her to perform an engine-out approach from downwind: Without some practice-i.e., some experience with that particular operation-its not likely to turn out well. What is experience? How to measure it? Most important: If its so valuable, how can we get more of it?

The most accurate reproduction of Charles Lindbergh’s famed Spirit of St. Louis ever built made its first test flight on Saturday when Rhinebeck Aerodrome Museum pilot and aircraft restorer/builder Ken Cassens took the replica Ryan NYP into the bright blue skies over upstate New York. “It was uneventful, which is a good thing, and I […]

What’s new in the world of avionics? Attitude indicators are now FAA approved. If you own a drone, get ready to have it registered. Virtual Air Traffic Control is coming to the States. Cargo overloading leads to crash killing nine people in Alaska. The NTSB holds a panel on loss of control, and more.

The Air Force Materiel Command has publicly admitted to a mishap in which an Air Force test pilot crew got the ride of their life in April of this year. An AC-130J Ghostrider, an airplane weighing as much as 164,000 pounds, went inverted during a test flight and was severely damaged, a mistake that is […]

When did the world shrink? When did the vast distances between continents fall away like sheer cliffs, leaving behind a much smaller planet? The aviation-savvy reader might choose a specific date, Dec. 17, 1903, on the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk with the Wright brothers — the dawn of the age of the airplane. Today, […]

As details of a tragic crash of a Hawker business jet emerge, it has been confirmed that nine people lost their lives when the airplane crashed into an apartment building in Ellet, a neighborhood in Akron, Ohio, on Tuesday. While the apartment building and an adjacent home were destroyed in the post crash fire, it […]