Pilot Proficiency

Well, this is it. I’ve given notice. This three-day trip will be my last as a CJ3 captain for ­JetSuite. It has been a grand three years and a few days, but the nights away from home just got to be too many. When this trip is over, I will be ­retired. I won’t be […]

When St. Mary’s Church asked Cincinnati bishop Joseph Binzer to officiate at a “Blessing of Aircraft” ceremony at Grimes Field in Urbana, Ohio, Bishop Joe demonstrated remarkable faith in divine providence and flew with me in 72B to this central Ohio town. It was September 18, the feast day of a 17th-century Italian monk famous […]

“You gave us all quite a scare last night.” I gradually became aware that I was in a hospital and Martha was explaining to me that I had had a lapse of consciousness. You will appreciate that the very first thing that came into my mind was concern for my aviation medical certificate. The hospital […]

After an extensive evaluation process, FlightSafety has chosen Safe Flight Instrument Corp. to equip more than 30 airplanes in its Piper training fleet in Vero Beach, Florida, with head-up angle of attack indexer displays. Safe Flight’s SCc lift transducer provides an accurate AoA reading by measuring the wing’s leading edge stagnation point and flow field. […]

The last time I flew my flying club’s 1940 J-3 Cub, it really should have been with the door open and warm breezes wafting through the cabin, passing low over rolling pastures and smelling the verdant earthiness of a rural Minnesota summer. This is the way every pilot should experience flying at least once in […]

The Hawker jet was descending through 13,500 feet, near the end of a 34-minute hop from Dayton, Ohio, to Akron Fulton Airport, when one of the passengers leaned through the cockpit door. “You guys know where we’re going, right?” It was a joke, but it wasn’t far off the mark. The National Transportation Safety Board’s […]

Just a little bit lower.” Those words are a great way to star in an NTSB accident report (right up there with “watch this”), since they usually precede a dangerous maneuver. While low passes are certainly not a new ­invention, the motivation for them seems to have evolved lately, and we can thank the smartphone. […]

Pressure Altitude Density Altitude Example: Pressure altitude = 6,000 feet Outside air temp = 13 degrees C ISA (@ 6,000 feet) = 3 degrees C {from rule of thumb: (-2 degrees x each 1,000 feet msl) + 15 = ISA} (13 – 3) x 120 + 6,000 = 7,200 feet density altitude Indicated Altitude True […]

I was a 30-year-old 600-hour instrument instructor with half ownership in a well-equipped Piper Archer II and a good job to pay the bills. I felt I had a good understanding of my personal minimums and promised myself never to break them — a policy that has paid off many times. But that almost wasn’t the […]

For the past 30 years, aviation has benefited from traffic collision avoidance systems (TCAS) installed in large airplanes. The newest version of this safety technology, TCAS II, provides aural and visual warnings to pilots as well as resolution advisories instructing, for example, one airplane to climb and another to descend to avoid a midair collision. […]