Pilot Proficiency

The fiery crash of a Cessna Citation CJ2 into a hangar at Santa Monica on Sunday evening left four dead and raised many questions about just what happened and why. Killed in the crash were a Santa Monica businessman, Mark Benjamin, his adult son Luke, and two women also on the flight, whose names have […]

While paved areas at airports are generally flat, there are times when runways, taxiways and parking areas are sloped. While sloped runways and taxiways in some cases require extra attention, sloped parking areas can cause major problems. I recently visited a beautiful airport in the southern part of the Sierra Nevada Mountains called Kern Valley […]

More than six decades after Navy test pilot George Thackray Weems perished in an airplane crash at the age of 30, the story of his journey across the world with his father, famous navigator P.V.H. Weems, is finally being told in George’s own words. In Box Kite to Bali: The Last Great Adventure of a […]

When New England Patriots star defensive lineman Vince Wilfork left the field on Sunday with a torn Achilles tendon, some NFL fans wondered if seven-time Pro Bowler Richard Seymour might be available to replace him. The 33-year-old ex-Patriot is currently a free agent. His departure from the team with which he won three Super Bowls […]

The homebuilding world lost one of its icons last week with the death of Carl Unger, the co-inventor of the Breezy open-cockpit kitplane. He was 82. Unger designed and constructed the Breezy prototype in 1964 with fellow corporate pilots and homebuilding enthusiasts Charley Roloff and Bob Liposky. The trio flew the unique three-seater to the […]

If the George Zimmerman trial wasn’t enough to feed a media frenzy, a major airplane crash at one of the country’s busiest airports filled the remaining void. When I was contacted by a national TV network to validate a specific nuance of the 777 automation system, I actually considered that maybe this time the media […]

In March 2012 in southern Georgia, a hot-air balloon was sucked into a thunderstorm. Carried to 17,000 feet in an updraft, battered by 1-inch hail, its fabric envelope tore open and collapsed. Only four days later did searchers finally locate it in a forested area miles from the launch point. Large clumps of compacted hail […]

A Colorado sheriff’s officer recently ticketed a Blackhawk helicopter blocking one lane of a deserted road after the pilot landed in support of National Guard troops called in to rescue victims stranded by flooding. The Boulder Sheriff’s officer wrote the $150 ticket for the dubious offenses of “Parking in no parking zone” and “Parked facing […]

If you’re headed to San Marcos, Texas, next month for the dollar-a-gallon gasoline, you might consider using some of the money you saved for a weekend-long pilot proficiency forum series and hour-long session in a Redbird motion simulator. The Society of Aviation and Flight Educators (SAFE) will be holding its first ever regional Pilot Proficiency […]

It was five years ago this week that the wheels came off the global economy. As we all vividly remember, the U.S. government bailout of AIG and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 sent the Dow into a tailspin unlike anything we had seen in decades. The historic Great Recession was officially under […]