Pilot Proficiency

On the morning of December 29, 2015, I was planning a flight in my flying club’s Piper PA-28-235 from Northwest Regional Airport (52F) in Roanoke, Texas, to Clark Field Municipal Airport (KSEP) in Stephenville. The idea was to have lunch at a favorite barbecue restaurant. I planned to depart 52F and land at Fort Worth […]

An angle of attack indicator offers a visual indication of the amount of lift the wing is generating at a given airspeed or angle of bank. The AOA delivers critical information visually or through an aural tone to indicate the actual safety margin above an aerodynamic stall. AOAs are created around one of two systems, […]

AOPA’s Air Safety Institute has introduced a monthly podcast series named “There I Was…” The podcasts are aimed at educating pilots through discussions with a variety of pilots talking about unexpected scenarios and how they survived them. “There I Was…” is hosted by ASI’s executive director Richard McSpadden, a former commander/flight leader of the USAF […]

TOMATO FLAMES? Are you kidding? I’m sitting with my friend and CFI Paul Sallach in the restaurant at the Inn at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, California, nibbling on a turkey BLT while doing the ground portion of my flight review, what people used to call a biannual flight review. All is well thus far. […]

“Airspeed alive. Eighty knots. V1. Rotate,” I said as I rolled down Runway 18C at Memphis International Airport in HondaJet N420HB. Immediately after rotation — boom! One engine failed. “Lots of right rudder. Heading bug centered. Positive rate, gear up. Pitch for V2. Push FLC. Altitude check, autopilot on. Continue climb to 2,000 feet. Select […]

Tonight I am nestled in a cozy corner of Windbird’s enclosed cockpit, feet propped on her helm and a rum drink in my hands as I watch her dance to and fro across the anchor chain in the faint light of a milky half-moon. We are in the Bahamas’ Berry Islands and have tucked into […]

The visual approach slope indicator (VASI) and precision approach path indicator (PAPI) are light systems on the side of a runway threshold that provide visual descent guidance information during approach. Here are the particulars of the different types of path-lighting systems: Two-Bar Visual Approach Slope Indicator (VASI) Two-bar VASI installations provide one visual glidepath, which […]

Runway visual range, or RVR, precisely measures the distance that a pilot flying an ILS approach might expect to see when looking down the runway in those critical seconds just before touchdown. Because landing and some takeoff minimums are based on visibility, an operating RVR system is a vital operational element to support the high […]

For the May issue of Flying, Executive Editor Pia Bergqvist traveled to Greensboro, North Carolina, to visit FlightSafety International’s HondaJet training facility. It was there that she took on the HA-420, one of FlightSafety’s most recently launched type-rating programs, to see what the course would be like for a customer who had no previous type […]

Thirsting for knowledge, I Googled why we drive on one side of the road rather than the other. I found a lot of obvious rubbish about quarrelsome knights and Roman charioteers. I suspect that what really happened was Henry Ford flipped a quarter and William Morris a shilling, and they came up different. Nevertheless, I […]