Pilot Proficiency

It was late August and I was in Goose Bay in Labrador, Canada. For two days, my time there had been spent either at the local weather station or in my hotel room, parked in front of the Weather Channel. I had departed Bangor, Maine, two days before. My mission was to deliver a pretty […]

Cash prizes have been big motivators in aviation. The first flights across the Atlantic, the first man-powered flight, the first flight into space by a nongovernmental program — to name a few — were brought about, or at the very least hurried along, by the lure of a big payday. Not to say that honor […]

Is it possible to love two professions beyond reasonableness and be unable to distinguish which one delights you more? This romantic dilemma can occur with humans, but among professions? A recent “recurrent” gave new instruction about such a love triangle. I thought I had enjoyed a 40-plus-year career in surgery about as much as anybody […]

Her name was Maddie, she was 11 years old, and she had never been in a small plane before. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, smaller and shyer than her giggling friends, Maddie had surprised me by shooting her hand skyward when I asked who wanted to sit up front. “OK, but just so you know, you might […]

In a Skycatcher you don’t exactly slip the surly bonds, but we did successfully levitate on the recreational pilot test I gave yesterday. Actually, this curious little Cessna 162 sport machine could grow on you if it weren’t for that really weird control stick. My earnest young applicant was nervous but well prepared, and he […]

The rudder travel limiter of the Indonesia AirAsia Airbus A320 began acting up in January 2014. Attempts to fix it were unsuccessful, and failures became increasingly frequent. In the course of 74 flights between December 19 and December 27, 2014, the airplane’s electronic centralized aircraft monitoring system, or ECAM, reported more than 30 faults. Many […]

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 […]