Aviation Safety

A touch of inspiration keeps us going when difficult times surround us—so the advent of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association annual awards presented on February 3 via livestream felt like the push forward we all need. The General Aviation Awards honor select people in the industry who have made major contributions over the course […]

In December 2019, a Canadian-registry Piper Aerostar 602P with three aboard left Cabo San Lucas in Baja California, Mexico, to return home to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The group stopped overnight at Chino, California, east of Los Angeles—perhaps to visit the aviation museum there—and continued the next day to Nanaimo with a […]

What a salesman! With one phone call, this Cessna 180 owner and regional director of the International 180/185 Club had sold me on joining the organization and speaking at their convention next year. And by now, you’ve probably gathered that “joining” and “speaking” are recessive genes in my DNA. But I was intrigued when Eric […]

The title of Ernest K. Gann’s memoir—”Fate Is the Hunter”—about his aviation career in the first half of the 20th century grabbed hold of me the first time I read the words. It’s an evocative phrase with many exertions, but they all point to the same conclusion: If you do something dangerous and you do […]

A new safety tool, the Dynamic Regulatory System, recently released online by the FAA, brings together documents and data from more than a dozen agency repositories. The DRS combines more than 65 document types—upwards of 2 million regulatory documents—into one searchable application, including all of the information found in the Flight Standards Information System (FSIMS) […]

The Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) said in May 2019 a relatively new flight instructor managed to wrestle control of a Cessna 152 away from a student pilot at just 400 feet agl after the aircraft abruptly pitched down into a steep dive at 2,000 feet agl. The instructor sustained minor injuries while the student […]

Unseen—for the most part, unless rendered visible by dust or contrails—and always unwelcome, wake turbulence causes flight-path disruption at best, and fatal accidents when encountered at its worst. Pilots do what they can to avoid it, especially when on takeoff or landing, and controllers are tasked with helping us to steer clear. Still, we’re not […]

If you think back to the days when you regularly travelled aboard an airliner, you’ll remember it’s a federal crime to interfere with a flight crewmember carrying out their normal duties. Practically, that usually meant some poor flight attendant trying to deal with a passenger who’d had too much to drink. Since the pandemic hit […]

The National Transportation Safety Board has recovered the cockpit voice recorder from a Cessna Citation 560—N3RB—that crashed on January 9 on the Warm Springs Reservation approximately 75 miles southeast of Portland, Oregon. The aircraft was headed to Boise, Idaho, on an IFR flight plan and departed Portland Troutdale Airport at 1:08 pm local time (PST). […]

When people are madly in love, they usually want to share their joy and passion. When those people happen to be pilots and their passion is an airplane, they join a type club—in which others share their love for the Bonanza or a Cirrus or a Cessna 120 and also to soak up the latest […]