Pilot Proficiency

NTSB investigators say the crash of an Aeronca Champ at Taunton Municipal Airport in Massachusetts over the weekend may have been caused by the pilot’s failure to remove the rudder gust lock before trying to take off. The 1946 Aeronca 7AC reached an altitude of around 50 to 100 feet seconds after taking off on […]

It is not often that I am able to accept an invitation from a reader, but when 27-year-old First Officer Will Romualdo offered me a jumpseat view with Avianca Brazil, I could not refuse. For the last two months, I had been flying the daytime trip to São Paulo. The layover would afford me the […]

One of the great heroes of general aviation, Paul Poberezny, died today at the age of 91. Poberezny inspired thousands of people to build and fly their own airplanes by sharing his own experience as a homebuilder. He founded the Experimental Aircraft Association in 1953, where he served as president until 1989 when his son, […]

Our recently launched gallery Flying Magazine’s “51 Heroes of Aviation” has been a runaway success, but it has not been without controversy. A number of readers have weighed in that we had left off their choice of most inspirational aviation figure — we can’t name names for fear of spoiling the gallery for those of […]

Last Sunday morning Scouts of Troop 150 from West Salem, Oregon, were breaking camp along the shore of Marion Lake in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest when they spotted a Cessna 172B that was clearly in trouble. Their leader, Matt Matthews, said that as the Skyhawk cleared a ridge and settled toward the surface of the […]

An Ohio couple that was visiting family in Kansas City died this week shortly after departing the Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport near downtown Kansas City, Missouri, in their single-engine Mooney. Lynn Lundsford from the FAA said the pilot had reported “an undisclosed problem” after lifting off and had been “cleared by the controllers to […]

| There’s only one foolproof way to ensure you don’t end up as an accident statistic in yet another stall/spin fatal crash: Avoid stalling in the first place. Yet if the goal is to avoid stalling, why do we spend so much time practicing stalls? After all, 97 percent of stall/spin accidents that start at […]

It’s been nearly three decades since William Suitor, aka Rocketman, wowed about 2.5 billion viewers around the world when he took off with his rocket belt over the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympic games in Los Angeles. And it was around the same time that inventor Glenn Martin, the founder of Martin Aircraft Company […]

The pilot of a Bradley BA100 light sport aircraft carefully checked the GoPro cameras mounted on the exterior of his airplane. With video rolling, he took off from Skylark Airport in Killeen, Texas, but shortly after passing the departure end of the 5,495-foot runway, his engine lost power. The video shows a slight right turn […]

Airtime on aviation frequencies, whether you are communicating on a clearance, ground, tower, departure, en route, arrival or CTAF frequency, should be kept to a minimum. You need to make yourself understood in a quick, concise manner. You do this by using certain wording that all pilots should be accustomed with. But if you speak […]