On Course

If there’s anything that the FAA’s latest aviation industry forecast proves, it’s that you can make the numbers paint just about any picture you want them to, especially when you’re guessing using assumptions about what might happen 20 years from now. For instance, what if I told you that the number of student pilots in […]

A few weeks ago we reported on an upcoming job fair being put together by Wasinc International, China’s largest pilot placement firm, and hosted by Pan Am International Flight Academy at its training centers in Miami and Las Vegas. What was unusual about the event was the airlines being represented. There were 12 Chinese carriers […]

I got an e-mail the other day from a reader with a heart-wrenching story that should serve as a cautionary tale for all pilots. He told me about a good friend of his who was killed, along with the friend’s wife and kids, in an airplane crash last summer in Idaho. Because the two were […]

“Don’t put the gear down just yet,” said the instructor, who also happened to be the owner of the flight school where I was getting my commercial multi training. I was in the midst of performing the requisite 10 night takeoffs and landings in a Piper Seneca and this was my third or maybe fourth […]

Manslaughter charges brought against a New Hampshire private pilot who held only a single-engine land pilot certificate when he crashed his Cessna 310 twin on New Years Day 2011 should serve as a warning to all pilots. The message is this: If you do something dumb in an airplane, not only can people be hurt […]

The details of the near disaster are chilling. A Cessna 172 and an Embraer Regional Jet at Biloxi-Gulfport International Airport in Mississippi were cleared to take off on runways with intersecting departure paths only moments apart. On departure they missed each other, thank goodness, but only by a couple of hundred feet horizontally and by […]

Remember that online petition asking the White House to abandon its $100 per flight user fee proposal? More than 9,000 of you signed it, prompting the government to consider the issue and write a response. Authored by Dana Hyde, a Washington bureaucrat with the bureaucratic-sounding job title Associate Director for General Government Programs for the […]

I just got back from a roundtrip flight to Central Florida for a speaking engagement, and even after all these years of flying 1,000-nm trips in light airplanes, I was still surprised by how starkly different the “out” and the “back” legs were. This is one important lesson about transportation flying that no one ever […]

_Enola Gay. FIFI. The Great Artiste. Kee Bird. The Big Stink. _ It was an airplane dubbed “Superfortress.” Yet many of the most famous Boeing B-29 bombers that plied the skies during the latter days of World War II carried strangely meek-sounding individual names. Perhaps that’s of benefit to our collective psyche since the airplanes […]

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing in Washington after that super-secret American spy drone fell into Iranian hands last week. Tehran claims it shot down the UAV, which analysts have identified as an RQ-170 Sentinel. The White House has asked for it back. The Iranian government has responded with the diplomatic equivalent of, “In your […]