Pilot Proficiency

We asked our readers what makes flying so cool and you all responded with awesome aviation footage that we continue to showcase. But don’t miss out on your chance to show us your passion! Submit your video by Thursday, January 15, to be included in a chance to win a Garmin VIRB Action Camera. __Here’s […]

Well, I did it again. No, not crash, just piss somebody off. An old flatbed trailer parked behind a fence and piled with remnants of a pranged flying machine caught my eye as I drove down Airport Road to pull ’72B out of the hangar and go flying. I’d seen the trailer before and assumed […]

After wrapping up a year of several successful regional fly-ins, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association has announced it will be continuing its focus on smaller, local events in 2015. The association has unveiled five new fly-in locations for the new year, and they span the continental U.S., with one to take place on May […]

In an effort to make already-safe airlines even safer, the FAA yesterday issued a final rule requiring most U.S. carriers to create formal safety management systems (SMS) by 2018. Many airlines have already voluntarily created SMS programs, which include formal, top-down, organization-wide approaches to managing safety risk. An SMS gives an airline a set of […]

If you’re flying in a part of the country where the TV weather personality uses terms like “wind chill,” “arctic blast” and “polar vortex” you’ll want to modify your winter checklist with a few common-sense items. Warm clothing is a must — you ought to be able to easily walk to safety in the event […]

A seven-year-old girl who survived the crash of a Piper Seneca that killed four of her family members on Friday is recovering from her injuries as her local community rallies to support her both financially and emotionally. Sailor Gutzler was flying with her family back home to Illinois from a Christmas holiday in Key West, […]

In the thin air above 20,000 feet, with German fighters bearing down from all directions, the inside of an unpressurized American bomber in World War II was an altogether foreign world. Freezing cold, oxygen-deprived and hundreds of miles from the nearest friendly fighter escort, the bombers faced desperate odds with each mission deep into enemy […]

It was a lousy day for a VFR trip — not unusual in coastal Southern California in the spring. We get stratus clouds that come in from the ocean and create low ceilings that last for days. On this particular day we needed to get a package up to Corona Airport, and I did not […]

It was a clear but chilly January morning when I arrived at Madison County Executive (MDQ) in Huntsville, Alabama, to return home after my first “real” cross-country flight. Three days earlier I had made the 462 nm journey from my home airport in Liberty, Missouri, to Huntsville. At this point I had roughly 95 hours […]

With the iPad propped up on the restaurant table, I picked away at my veggie omelet. Not entirely confident that the almost cartoonish radar data of the flight planning program was presenting an accurate picture, I switched to my professional weather rock — the WSI program. I thought it apropos that I had spent the […]