Pilot Proficiency

The late afternoon sky was clear and the air crisp. Light spread itself evenly across the landscape in the absence of clouds, and colorful fugitive leaves danced across the runway ahead of a mild, quartering crosswind. The relative calm outside the cockpit of my Cessna trainer dueled in graphic opposition to the inner excitement I […]

“Is there a way to compute the strength of up- and downdrafts based on the amount of increase or decrease in airspeed? If I’m cruising along at an indicated 135 knots with a constant power setting, maintaining altitude and see my airspeed decrease to 110 knots as I pitch up to overcome downdrafts while maintaining […]

Attitude and heading reference systems (AHRS) have been providing heading and attitude information with greater accuracy and reliability than traditional mechanical gyros for years now. But how do these solid-state systems deliver this information, and how do they do so using increasingly smaller and lighter equipment? Micro Electronics An AHRS’s key features include ­micro-electronic mechanical gyros, […]

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 […]