Pilot Proficiency

An Air Force drone crashed on takeoff on Wednesday, exploding in a fireball and forcing the closure of a Florida Panhandle highway. Officials said no one was injured but the road could be closed for up to 24 hours. The Air Force shut down Highway 98 near Tyndall Air Force Base west of Panama City […]

Much has been said and written about the FAA’s plans to overhaul the decades-old regulations governing the certification of Part 23 airplanes. The new regulations, we are told, will cut certification costs in half. These savings will be passed along to consumers – that is, us pilots. Congress likes the idea so much that it […]

Do you consider yourself mentally healthy? At least, for a pilot? The FAA is asking for volunteer GA pilots for confidential testing of cognitive skills during EAA AirVenture Oshkosh. The purpose is to establish baseline readings of brain-function data among healthy pilots so the agency can evaluate those recovering from brain injuries. The FAA assures […]

The NTSB is continuing to work toward increasing GA safety, a topic that has been on the agency’s most wanted list since 2011. One way the NTSB is bringing accident-prone topics to life this summer is by publishing five short videos, three to five minutes in length, each addressing common causes of accidents. The first […]

“Whoa! Stop. You would not do that to your lawn mower.” I hear this over the din of the engine and next feel a firm left hand atop my sweating right hand. The left hand slowly pulls my tightly clenched right hand and the throttle on the Cessna 150 toward the idle position. As opposed […]

A North Carolina pilot late last night successfully landed his single-engine Piper Cherokee between cars on Highway 321 a few miles short of Hickory Regional Airport after running out of fuel. The pilot, Eric Klein, told a reporter for WSOC that when he ran out of fuel he was too low to make the airport […]

We all know that the Nexrad weather graphics we see on our multifunction displays can be dangerously outdated, showing the location of storms not where they are now but where they were many minutes ago. But did you know that the precipitation data displayed on ARTCC radar scopes suffers from a similar lag? Maybe you […]

Plane spotters in England got the scare of their lives when a Eurofighter Typhoon came within feet of the perimeter fence at RAF Waddington while landing for an airshow earlier this month. Spectators scrambled for cover as the jet roared past, its wheels barely skimming over the large group of spotters. In photos taken of […]

Last summer, my wife and I wanted to visit the Brooks Range in August to hunt Dall sheep. For those not familiar with it, the Brooks Range is a mountain range stretching about 700 miles from western Alaska across the state east to Canada’s Yukon Territory. From where we live in South Central Alaska, it […]

Multitasking is accepted as a given in our modern technology-driven society. Anyone with a teenager has shaken his head at the sight of his child doing homework while listening to music at a loud volume through earphones, and at the same time carrying on multiple texting conversations and surfing the Internet. While a multicore computer […]