Learn to Fly

Most of us learn best through the hands-on application of knowledge. You see this throughout aviation as you apply what you’ve learned in ground school to your actions in the airplane. Take it another step further: What if you had the opportunity to learn about aircraft design, create your own airplane in sophisticated software, and […]

Securing the funds to make your flying dreams happen takes planning and strategic thinking. There are a range of solutions for finding sources of financing, planning for your expected expenditures, and applying for scholarships that will help you on your way. The first question to answer: What level of flying do you wish to achieve? […]

People with a broad range of physical capabilities can learn to fly airplanes, and it pays to know in advance what standards you need to meet in order to become a pilot. You also need to assess your ability to fly on a daily basis, making sure that your overall health and mental state allow […]

Finding the right flight school is one key to ensuring that your flight training is a success. You need to know what your goal is before you start, and a few common elements apply to your decision, no matter what that goal is. A flight school (otherwise known as an aviation training organization, or ATO) […]

Summer time may mean vacation for some, but for the providers of flight training materials, it’s an important time to roll out updates to the date-sensitive products they supply to students. At EAA AirVenture last week, Aviation Supplies & Academics updated Flying on its line of training materials for 2020, including a new version of […]

Learning to fly an airplane requires you to work one-on-one with a professional pilot called a Certificated Flight Instructor (CFI)—which refers to the FAA credentials that this person must hold. You may have worked closely with an instructor when you’ve learned to drive, or SCUBA dive, or ride a horse, or any number of similar […]

From the time I was a teenage recruit in the Navy I had always wanted to fly. Some five years later I had my opportunity to get my private pilot’s license. That wasn’t enough for me, so I applied for a G.I. Bill benefit and began working on advanced ratings, eventually earning my CFII, AMEL […]

Pete Daniels flies Boeing 787s for one of the world’s largest airlines. He makes $380,000 a year and works an average of nine days per month. He has been flying commercially for more than 30 years. He is one of scores of airline pilots who will reach the FAA’s mandatory retirement age, 65, within the […]

My interest in flying began years before my first lesson. In one of my early books, The Joy of Flying, I detailed the hours spent as a kid watching airplanes at Chicago Midway Airport (MDW), dropping nickels in the coin-operated binoculars atop the terminal’s now-removed observation deck. “Those great silver machines would gather speed and […]

JetBlue Airways is considering a new training program to get pilots ready for the copilot and captain’s seats. The program would take pilot candidates with no previous experience and train them to become competent airline pilots. Rather than training in smaller, cost-effecting airplanes, most of the flight training would focus on airline related tasks, such […]