Pilot Proficiency

An expert pilot stalls and recovers from a spin. High-profile airline accidents in recent years — Air France Flight 447, Colgan Air Flight 3407 and Asiana Flight 214 among them — have renewed focus on loss of control — in flight (LOC-I), the leading cause of aviation fatalities. To counter these preventable accidents, regulatory authorities […]

In an era of constantly improving aviation safety, loss of control — in flight (LOC-I) continues to result in preventable tragedies, maintaining its position as the No. 1 cause of aviation fatalities. From 1994 to 2003, LOC-I accounted for 36 percent of accident fatalities in commercial jet aviation, and in the following 10-year period, from […]

The light on the panel read “OIL1.” It was telling us we had low oil pressure in the left engine. We didn’t believe it. In 14 years of flying our old Falcon 10, we had never seen an oil light come on. We looked down at the oil-pressure gauge to reassure ourselves that there was […]

Simulator technology with motion has developed rapidly in the past few decades, but until now the price of motion sims has been too expensive for most pilots to go out and buy. That may change now that a company in Sun City Center, Florida, has developed a sim called Sky Fantasy. For $3,395, you can […]

The other day, I was flying along and overheard a conversation between a controller and a pilot attempting to depart IFR from an uncontrolled field nearby. The controller gave the pilot a clearance with a void time. When the pilot read back the clearance I noticed that he made no mention of the void time. […]

As you probably know, the movie The Martian concerns an astronaut who gets stranded on Mars and contrives to survive there until rescuers can come to get him. It has a kind of Potemkin village verisimilitude: a facade of scientific-sounding talk concealing ramshackle structures of crossed fingers and nonsense. Screenwriters are not under oath, but unfortunately […]

I’m not superstitious. I’ll brave an elevator that stops on the 13th floor. I won’t deem the day a potential catastrophe when a black cat crosses my path. But after a round trip to São Paulo, Brazil, during a total lunar eclipse, I had to wonder. This particular eclipse also qualified as a blood moon, […]

They were a big Irish family in Hamilton, Ohio. I’m not sure if Bernie or Joe was the oldest, but Art and Bill came along about 10 years later with another brother and three sisters somewhere in between. In 1929, after a neighboring farmer, “Pop” Muhlburger, taught the two oldest boys to fly in his […]

As on all major holidays, July 4, 2015, was a day to take my beloved Grumman Yankee out to stretch her legs and keep my flying skills proficient. Never did I expect that this would be a day of reckoning and facing up to my first inflight mechanical failure in more than 36 years of flying. […]

The airport at Los Alamos, New Mexico, lies on a mesa with ravines on three sides and rising terrain to the west. The 6,000-foot runway, 7,200 feet above sea level, is oriented east-west, with a slight upslope to the west. Because of the noise sensitivities of a community just beyond the departure end of Runway […]