Pilot Proficiency

Garmin is expanding its online course curriculum with a course designed to help pilots interpret onboard weather radar data. Weather radar is a terrific tool for pilots to avoid adverse conditions in the sky and help them make better weather-related decisions. Garmin’s Weather Radar Operations eLearning Course teaches pilots basic and intermediate weather radar operations, […]

So far it’s unconfirmed, but the FAA is taking seriously a report that a Piper twin was involved in a midair collision with a UAV over northern Illinois on August 27. Maybe we should be calling it a UFO, since the FAA’s incident report refers to a collision between the Piper Apache and an “unidentified […]

Last week brought record heat to the west coast, with temperatures reaching beyond 100 degrees in my neck of the woods. It was a perfect time to fly to Phoenix for a story — not. But alas, a trip to the city in the desert was on my schedule. It was a good opportunity to […]

Over the last few days I’ve been getting a lot of advice from a lot of people who I would say are a lot smarter than me and who have a lot more experience, in aviation and in life. It’s gratifying to know there are accomplished folks who are willing to take the time to […]

A tragic accident happened on Friday as aerobatic pilot Andrew Wright was preparing for a performance at the New York Air Show at Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, New York. Based on footage taken from a photographer on the ground, it appears that the entire tail section of Wright’s Giles G-202 airplane was torn off […]

As I shuffled charts and pages of the latest Jeppesen revision into various binders and folders, my copilot introduced herself. Lisa had recently returned from medical leave and was glad to be back at work. Upon reflection, perhaps the medical leave aspect was a foreshadowing of what was about to come. Our flight planning review […]

The service was at a Presbyterian church in a small town east of Cincinnati — about a 30-minute flight in the Cessna 180. I had planned to fly there and commandeer the airport’s retired police car, but my airplane wouldn’t start. When I jumped in and “cranked,” it wouldn’t fire — odd, because it was […]

The most recent general aviation safety report from AOPA’s Air Safety Institute shows an “unprecedented” decrease in non-commercial airplane accidents, dropping below 1,000 annually for the first time. It’s tempting to correlate the drop in GA fixed-wing accidents with a reduction in overall flight hours, but FAA estimates show that the safety improvement notched noteworthy […]

Plan your flights on your desktop or laptop computer, automatically sync them to ForeFlight Mobile on your tablet and then use ForeFlight Connect to sync directly with your avionics in the cockpit. That’s the vision ForeFlight’s creators have for their flight planning subscription service with new web browser capability now in beta testing. Whether they […]

As we all know, bad weather can wreak havoc on air traffic flow for all airplanes from light single-engine propeller airplanes to heavy airliners. Here is a cool video that shows the traffic flow around Atlanta during a time of severe but localized thunderstorms. The video shows the accelerated flight paths of airplanes going into […]