Pilot Proficiency

I’d just sunk my hands into a gloriously gluey lump of flour and water when the wall phone rang. Yes, I still have a landline, bake bread, can pickles, put up preserves and make mud pies. I grabbed the receiver with my grossly sticky hand and spent most of a half-hour listening to a young […]

Piper PA-12 Burnet, Texas/Injuries: 2 Uninjured The flight instructor of the amphibious float-equipped airplane reported that after an instructional lesson, while returning to the airport, the student pilot was too low “while turning base leg” of the traffic pattern so the student pilot moved the throttle forward to add power, but the engine did not […]

Beech A36 Kernersville, North Carolina/Injuries: 3 Fatal The private pilot had recently purchased the airplane, and it was more complex than the airplane he had flown previously. The accident airplane was also equipped with an upgraded avionics suite. The pilot had practiced loading and flying instrument approaches with the new avionics during recent flights with […]

Selfies, in case you have recently emerged from solitary confinement, are those self portraits, preferably set in interesting or unusual surroundings or amid a clump of friends, that one takes with a cellphone camera, sometimes holding it on the end of a selfie stick to gain a wider field of view. They have spawned a […]

Ratings Man is a ratings collector. No matter how many ratings or hours anyone has, he has more. Many of us go after the more common upgrades to our private pilot certificates, such as an instrument rating or high-performance and complex aircraft endorsements. Out in the wild blue yonder, we put these skills to good […]

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) says the recurrent training air traffic controllers receive to teach them how to effectively deal with pilots in need of emergency assistance often falls considerably short of any acceptable standard. This is also not the first time the NTSB cited the FAA over inadequate controller training. In a Safety […]

Approaches to mountainous airports can present special challenges because of the inability to create a straightforward procedure due to sharply rising terrain. The LDA DME-1 approach to Runway 18 at Lake Tahoe Airport features many unusual aspects that pilots unaccustomed to flying in the mountains may have rarely, if ever, experienced. Have a look at […]

When I first started flying Part 135 on five-day rotations, I ­anticipated meeting up with earthbound friends on overnights in ­Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, New Haven, Boston and Bozeman. I further expected to fetch up in various locales with flying friends on their trips. For airline friends, I thought Baltimore, New York, LA, Oakland, […]

There are airplanes out there, and I know it because they’re all stepping on each other over the radio. The CTAF is a cacophony of squeaks, squawks and indecipherable gibberish clearly announcing that everyone and their brother is flying today. And why not? It’s a gorgeous Saturday in coastal California. It would be nice to […]

With loss of control still the No. 1 cause of fatalities in commercial and general aviation, Aviation Performance Solutions (APS) in Mesa, Arizona, said last week that a college student, Chin-An Lin, had completed the company’s Upset Prevention and Recovery course. Chin-An, an international Aeronautical Science student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, received the training under […]