Pilot Proficiency

As an airline pilot, I generally try to stay out of the newspapers. Finding oneself on the front page of The New York Times usually means you’ve bent some metal, partied too hard on an overnight or finally lost patience with the TSA and sucker punched one of its goons while cellphone cameras rolled. And […]

Returning from a year of sequestration, the Blue Angels squadron will take to the skies at the inaugural Los Angeles County Air Show, set to take place this weekend at the General William J. Fox Airfield in the outskirts of Lancaster, California. The team of six F/A-18 Hornets will perform their nail-biting formation show, which […]

Accident investigators are reviewing amateur video that shows a Piper Aerostar twin performing extreme low-level maneuvers over a Colorado neighborhood moments before crashing. The pilot, the sole occupant in the airplane, was killed instantly when the Piper crashed in a fireball next to homes on the outskirts of Aurora. Nobody on the ground was hurt. […]

Search aircraft and ships are headed to a location in the southern Indian Ocean where Australian officials said satellite images show debris that could be from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Officials cautioned that is unclear at this point whether two large pieces of debris belong to the Boeing 777 that disappeared on March 8 […]

It’s probably not surprising that author Ernie Gann, a former captain for my airline, is one of my heroes. His poetic words epitomized the very beginning of commercial air travel — when it was romantic to fly. Captains were given the ultimate authority over nearly every aspect of their flights. But interestingly enough, he challenged […]

Driving from Tampa, Florida, to KPBI for class at JetSuite’s Palm Beach base, Phil Smith and I are reunited for one last time. Indoc and sim partners for almost a month, we are both about to fly as first officers for the first time; each of us has been assigned to a “B” captain for […]

Two people were killed and one was critically injured on Tuesday morning when a news helicopter crashed and burned next to Seattle’s Space Needle. Two cars were destroyed in the crash as flames and plumes of black smoke poured from the burning wreckage about 50 yards from the base of the Space Needle, according to […]

More than 10 days after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on a mysterious flight that started out headed for Beijing but ended up who knows where, investigators appear no closer to locating the missing Boeing 777. But a series of tantalizing clues is providing at least a glimpse of what may have happened […]

The preflight inspection is a critical phase that gives you an opportunity to make sure that everything is OK with the airplane before you lift off the ground. If everyone conducted a similar inspection of their cars, there would likely be far fewer people pulled over on the side of the road out of gas […]

There have been several attempts at depicting flight paths around busy airports and around the world, some more successful than others. One of the coolest visualizations has recently come out of Europe though a British company called NATS, which offers a variety of aviation-related solutions. Titled Europe 24, NATS’ video depicts actual flights arriving at […]