Pilot Proficiency

Four months after the crash of a Daher-Socata TBM 900 in the Caribbean Sea, the wreckage of the airplane and bodies of Larry and Jane Glazer were recovered off the coast of Jamaica on Monday. The wreckage was found in the water about two miles deep, according to the couple’s family. Glazer, the pilot and […]

Fliers landing at Birmingham Airport in the United Kingdom over the past few months encountered some pretty skill-testing conditions as strong crosswinds and wind gusts pummeled the runway area. Coupled with the additional challenge of an unlevel runway, the weather almost proved too much for some of the airplanes. Check out the footage in this […]

Even if you’ve never flown a taildragger, you probably know what a “groundloop” is. If not, it’s a sudden loss of directional control on the ground that’s normally associated with taildraggers, which have their centers of gravity aft of the pivot point and so naturally want to swap ends on landing. But can you groundloop […]

An analysis of radar data from the AirAsia Airbus A320 that crashed near Indonesia late last month points to a steep climb and aerodynamic stall that caused the jetliner to go out of control and plummet into the Java Sea, a government official said. Indonesian Transportation Secretary Ignasius Jonan said at a government hearing that […]

Tragedy struck the otherwise successful and upbeat U.S. Sport Aviation Expo in Sebring, Florida, last week when two people were killed in the crash of an Aero Adventure amphibious LSA near the main runway at Sebring Regional Airport. Officials identified the victims as pilot Dennis Day of Groveland, Florida, and Jason Sponks of Orlando. The […]

The pilot, 73, had more than 18,000 hours and an ATP certificate. He and his wife, an instrument-rated private pilot with over 800 hours, kept several airplanes, all vintage or Experimental, on their private strip in northeastern Pennsylvania. One of these was a taxicab-yellow 1944 Cessna T-50 “Bamboo Bomber,” a five-seat steel-tube-and-fabric taildragger with two […]

Remember when we made a big deal last month about the FAA permitting more training time in flight simulators to count toward the instrument rating? Well forget about it. The FAA formally withdrew that policy today, and then reinstated the mind-boggling requirement that instrument students wear Foggles or other view-limiting devices while flying on instruments […]

You know that New York City is home to some of the busiest airspace anywhere, and here’s the video that proves it. Created by Keith Smith, founder and CEO of PilotEdge, the live ATC service for flight simulators, the YouTube video depicts 24 hours of New York-area traffic condensed into 24 action-packed minutes. The screen […]

Some things you just can’t understand unless you were there. So, it’s fitting that a pair of crash survivors are most responsible for one of the most notable and controversial recent aviation safety innovations. They were there. The first, Boris Popov, had his day of motorboat-towed hang gliding over Lake Owasso, Minnesota, go topsy-turvy after […]

It was late, the end of a long and trying day, and we hadn’t even left the state of Texas. I caught glimpses of muted scrubland far below as we flitted in and out of dusky cumulus. I shifted in the right seat and glanced over at Johnny in the dim red cockpit light. The […]