Search Results for: wright

We spend a lot of time and space here fretting about training. In this issue, for example, regular contributor Bob Wright discusses the need for and obstacles to better integration into our training infrastructure of risk management concepts. Similarly, were always writing about getting with an instructor and practicing various maneuvers or procedures. But none of this is easy, nor inexpensive.Weve also railed from time to time about what Ill call the “FBO experience.” Too often, when a well-off prospective student and airplane owner drives his or her luxury SUV out to the airport to inquire about flying lessons, they are greeted in a dingy, poorly lit building by an uninformed employee who shrugs, saying, “Our flight instructor is up with a student.”

After he “aced” the ground (oral) portion of a private check ride I gave last week, this young man pointed the airplane in approximately the right direction, found a couple of checkpoints and made a reasonable guess about our time to the next one listed on his flight log sheet. This with benefit of a […]

At my day job, it’s easy to take for granted that most aspects of flight planning are generated by typing the appropriate codes into the computer. The data have already been entered by the dispatcher and the load planner. For the most part, my job is to simply review the information. When I made the […]

Having read about and studied the North American P-51 Mustang for as long as I can remember, how on earth could I have been surprised by anything when I had the opportunity to fly it? I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that most of those other writers were so used […]

Thankfully, most of my operations are fairly routine, and not too demanding of my average skills. The trick, of course, is keeping them sharp and knowing when to avoid a situation demanding more than I have to give. Thats one result of being trained by older instructors instead of time-building youngsters and accumulating a bit of experience over the years.

In the last decade, the general aviation fatal accident rate, which had been decreasing for some time, reached a plateau and has stubbornly resisted industry and FAA efforts to further reduce it. Hovering in the range of 1.20-1.38 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours, this safety record is widely considered a deterrent to general aviation growth and may be one of the reasons student starts have continued to decrease. As a community, we may have oversold the benefits of a new generation of technically advanced aircraft (TAA) to an emerging latent market of individuals who are not traditional enthusiasts and who wish to use these aircraft for safe transportation.

The world’s only flyable Boeing B-29 Superfortress is not quite airworthy — yet. It’s been four years since the Boeing last flew, and the efforts of the Commemorative Air Force (CAF) to return “FIFI” to the sky are close. But a “scheduling conflict” has led the FAA to delay issuing a new airworthiness certificate. FIFI […]

Its no great secret that nearly all new-production aircraft now have glass cockpits and advanced devices such as weather data link. Even technologies such as synthetic vision have become the new norm. In a way, the term technically advanced aircraft (TAA) has become a misnomer but it is still widely recognized as a tag line for a variety of related issues-including TAA training.

Please Plan on Attending” was the subject line in an e-mail from Marty Bevill at Wapakoneta airport (“Wapak” to the locals) about 100 miles north of Cincinnati. Officially AXV, it’s the Neil Armstrong Airport at New Knoxville in Auglaize County, nestled in mid-Ohio farm country south of Lima. The airport namesake grew up in Wapak […]

May 2010 ONE OF THE MORE persistent hoaxes drifting about on the Internet concerns an airplane called the Kalinin K-7. Built in the early 1930s, the K-7 was Russian, and big. Really big. Russian designers those days displayed a positive passion for sheer size; Igor Sikorsky’s Ilya Muromets, for example, which flew just 10 years […]