Pilot Proficiency

Just after noon on a June day in 2012, a Pilatus PC-12 took off from Fort Pierce, in the middle of Florida’s Atlantic coast, bound for Junction City, Kansas. The pilot, his wife and their four young children were aboard, returning from a vacation in the Bahamas. Less than a minute later, the pilot engaged […]

I could feel my mind going deeper and deeper into a fog. No matter how hard I tried to focus, I couldn’t seem to make sense of the basic problems that I had been tasked with. What is the sum of 15 plus 4? The question wasn’t hard, but it took all of my brainpower […]

Investigators say the pilot of a twin-turboprop Piper Cheyenne that crashed short of the runway at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport on Sunday reported smoke in the cockpit minutes before the airplane went down in a wooded area in a south Florida nature preserve. All four people were killed in the crash at about 4:25 p.m. […]

Invariably whenever somebody posts a fun flying video online, the Internet “sheriffs” come out in droves to inform the original poster of just how many Federal Aviation Regulations he or she has broken. Of course, the only thing that really matters is what the FAA has to say about your video. And a new national […]

The fast-moving cold front bristled against the western edges of Washington’s Cascade Mountains. Rain showers and gusty winds swirled through the valleys as thick clouds enveloped the rising terrain. Darkness had long since fallen that February night as clock hands edged past 10 p.m. Air traffic controller Jared Mike plugged his headset into the workstation […]

A student pilot who survived a helicopter crash in December has filed lawsuits claiming his instructor was using FaceTime, a popular video chat application, on his cell phone during the instructional flight in a Robinson R22. The lawsuits were filed by the student, Jonathan Desouza, and his lawyer against the flight school that operated the […]

The National Transportation Safety Board released more than 800 pages from its accident investigation docket that reveal troubling clues about what may have caused last May’s crash of a Gulfstream IV in Bedford, Massachusetts, which killed seven people on board including Philadelphia Inquirer owner Lewis Katz. The most disquieting information contained in the trove of […]

The National Transportation Safety Board yesterday issued four new Safety Alerts for general aviation pilots and mechanics highlighting risks uncovered in a number of recent accident investigations. Three of the alerts are geared toward pilots. They address: mountain flying skills and survival equipment considerations; transition training before flying an unfamiliar aircraft with different flight characteristics […]

Talk about a lucky landing. A pilot parachuted to safety onto the top of a hospital parking garage in downtown Reno, Nevada, on Sunday after an apparent encounter with severe mountain wave turbulence tore both the wings off his German-built Schleicher glider. Longtime glider enthusiast Bob Spielman was reportedly attempting to return to Minden-Tahoe Airport […]

As the holder of a Private Pilot certificate, you can fly any airplane with a gross weight up to 12,500 pounds. That means you can legally jump into any airplane as long as you meet the currency requirements established by the FAA. But would it be smart to simply jump in and go? The answer […]