Pilot Proficiency

The Asiana Boeing 777 that crashed at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday was flying in an unusually nose-high attitude on approach and “significantly below” its target airspeed, investigators said yesterday. The NTSB has confirmed that the jetliner had its gear down, flaps set to 30 degrees and the engines were at idle power — […]

The owner of the float-equipped Maule saw it crash. He was there to watch as his friend and a passenger arrived in the airplane. “I witnessed the airplane fly over the field,” he wrote, “and enter a downwind for a landing on Runway 4. As the plane turned from base to final, it banked at […]

With apologies to our vegan readers, we present the most delicious flight plan ever, with waypoints carefully chosen not necessarily to give the best routing but to offer the best life advice, in our humble opinions, that is. The picture was snapped in flight by Cirrus rep Ivy McIvers, who presumably hadn’t had any part […]

Two students from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Daytona Beach campus finished first in the collegiate division of the Air Race Classic, one of the oldest and most revered air races for women. Pilots Valdeta Mehanja and Danielle Erlichman placed first among collegiate competitors and third overall in the four-day, transcontinental race, originally known as the “Powder […]

I’ve watched “TWA Flight 800” — the much-hyped Epix original documentary that purports to present “new” evidence proving that a missile attack brought down the Paris-bound Boeing 747 over the Atlantic 17 years ago this month. Yesterday I interviewed Hank Hughes, a former NTSB investigator who was involved in the TWA 800 investigation. Here is […]

After our piece last week on the risky nature of airshow flying and the challenging process of improving safety given all the variables (“Airshow Crashes: The Cost of Doing Business? Going Direct, by Robert Goyer), we received a number of emails from our readers, one of whom is John Cudahy, the president of the International […]

My family has owned a 1931 Buhl Bull Pup single-place, open-cockpit “flying bathtub” since 1969. I was 16 when I won the youngest-pilot award at Merced’s Antique Fly-In in 1970. I’ve been flying this little antique airplane all my life. A few weekends ago, I came as close as you can to rolling it (and […]

A huge number of portable ADS-B receivers has hit the market in the last couple of years, giving pilots instant access to traffic and weather information on their iPad or Android tablets. Weather is broadcast continuously so there isn’t much mystery there. But traffic data is somewhat limited. This can make ADS-B confusing as pilots […]

Gerry Yagen’s 44 warbirds were just too much of a financial burden, he said. So the entire collection is up for sale. Long financed by Yagen’s string of vocational tech schools, the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach, Virginia, includes a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, a Focke Wulf Fw-190 and a de Havilland Dragon Rapide […]

Serenity turned to tragedy on Friday morning at the scenic and popular Johnson Creek Airport (3U2) near Yellow Pine, Idaho, located in the backcountry about 26 miles northeast of McCall (KMYF), as two small airplanes collided, killing a two-year-old boy and injuring three others. The airplanes were reportedly approaching the strip simultaneously, resulting in one […]