Pilot Proficiency

Harrison Ford made a successful emergency landing this afternoon at the Penmar Golf Course just off the departure end of Santa Monica Airport’s Runway 21. Ford was flying his Ryan PT-22 and from the crash footage it appears that he did a terrific job of making the forced landing as safely as he could, targeting […]

Around 11 a.m. this morning, Delta Flight 1086 skidded off Runway 13 at the LaGuardia Airport in New York. The area is in the middle of a winter storm with heavy snow and poor visibility. The airplane, a McDonnell Douglas MD-88, was on its way from Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia, carrying 131 passengers […]

More than five decades after what was termed “The Day the Music Died,” when rock and roll legends Buddy Holly (Charles Hardin), Ritchie Valens (Richard Valenzuela) and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson died after the Beechcraft Bonanza Model 35 they were flying in crashed, a Petition for Reconsideration or Modification (49 CFR – § 845.41) […]

The January day was crisp and cold with just wisps of high clouds painting the Texas sky as we, my two Air Force cadet student pilots and I, began our IFR cross-country. Before starting back to our base in west Texas, I checked the weather and was gratified to see the forecast we had received […]

I read a startling statistic recently. In 2013, there were more than 11,000 reported bird strike incidents among commercial, military and general aviation airplanes in the United States. That’s a lot of birds hitting a lot of aircraft. And now researchers think they know why bird strikes are so common in aviation. It turns out […]

As Honda Aircraft Company closes in on FAA certification for the much-anticipated HondaJet, the company has taken delivery of a simulator that will help train the operators of the light twinjet at the headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina. The full motion, Level D simulator as well as a HondaJet-specific training program were developed by Honda […]

We’ve all seen B-roll video footage of robots busily building cars on an assembly line, spinning and whirling with impressive precision and nary a human in sight. But you’ve probably never seen anything like this. Researchers in Germany have connected a robotic arm to the cockpit section of an airplane to create perhaps the world’s […]

Maybe, someday, at the end of a flight I will be able to say, “My performance as a pilot was perfect on that flight. I didn’t make a single mistake.” So far I have never come close. My performance (and John’s) on a recent flight is a great example. It was time for us to […]

Looking for a spiritual lift, I entered Signature Flight Support in Boston with its soaring cathedral ceilings and even higher fuel prices. I had hoped to beat Capt. Courtney Crain to the FBO as she was airlining in from Palm Beach, Florida. We had not flown together in months. Alas, she was already hunched over […]

I am fortunate that the majority of my trips can be categorized as mundane, a characteristic that all airline pilots aspire to for the sake of our passengers. The law of averages indicated I was due a trip that fell out of that category. And on this particular flight, it almost seemed as if the […]