Pilot Proficiency

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 […]

I should probably stick to telling flying stories, but ­occasionally I get so worked up that I can’t resist taking off on what I see as some new wacko FAA-mandated requirement or procedure. So it’s no surprise that the agency’s current ­“initiative” (in Bureaucratese) of replacing the Practical Test Standards with the Airman Certification Standards […]

Airplanes, pilots and airports: Where you find two, you’ll find the third. In my airplane-obsessed childhood, this indisputable fact led to an early acquaintance with every airfield within a 20-mile radius. These were quiet country fields, mind you, but every so often a Cessna would drop in to do a couple of touch-and-goes, or maybe […]

Growing up, I heard people say, “Sometimes you just have to learn the hard way.” We learn many valuable lessons in life this way after realizing that our decisions and actions (or lack thereof) lead to undesirable outcomes. For some situations, this is the only impactful way to affect a change in behavior — an […]