Pilot Proficiency

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 […]

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, […]