Pilot Proficiency

When someone on the ground shines a laser at an aircraft cockpit, there’s not much a pilot can do, and the effect can be disorienting and dangerous to crew and passengers. But a new line of eyewear developed to combat the increasing problem of laser flashes has been developed and is now available for preorder. […]

Pilots training for the instrument rating will again be permitted to log up to 20 hours in an approved aviation training device (ATD) after the FAA published a final rule that supersedes an earlier ruling, which cut sim training time to 10 hours. The FAA actually tried to fast-track the rule change in December 2014, […]

“Good judgment comes with experience; unfortunately, experience is usually gained through bad judgment.” That saying is probably as old as Wilbur and ­Orville. We old pilots have developed our good habits through many years of flying and training. We have made mistakes along the way, and we have learned from them. We have had the […]

On October 21, 2010, Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, an experienced pilot of 11,000 hours, landed his Cessna 340 on Runway 13/31 at the Port Isabel-Cameron County Airport despite the presence of the appropriate X markings designating the surface as closed. To say that the senator ruined the day of various construction workers operating equipment to […]

One of the biggest pleasures of flying airplanes is the freedom it provides. It is not only the ability to go virtually anywhere at any time that excites, but it’s also the ability to explore things you have never seen before from a bird’s-eye view. Part of the joy of flight is discovering some intriguing […]

Airborne upset prevention and recovery training (UPRT) is now recognized as the key to reducing loss of control – in flight (LOC-I) accidents, the No. 1 cause of aviation fatalities. Prevailance Aerospace Safety Academy in Chesapeake, Virginia, is one of the world’s leading centers for providing UPRT and other specialty instruction, and its clients include […]

Meet the crack pilots and UPRT specialists behind Prevailance Aerospace. Fleet operators, regulatory authorities and safety experts agree that upset prevention and recovery training (UPRT) is critical to reducing loss of control — in flight (LOC-I) accidents, the leading cause of aviation fatalities today. Moreover, the benefits of airborne UPRT over simulator-based training are also […]

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 […]