Pilot Proficiency

A number of years ago, I attended an Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association flight-instructor refresher class as a newly licensed CFI-I. The instructor asked a roomful of about 60 CFIs if anyone had lost an engine and made a forced landing. I have never forgotten that day, when almost half the people in the room […]

| The forest below was thick and rolling, with leafy hilltops set ablaze by the setting sun and brooding valleys already lost to deepening shadows. A few lights twinkled to life through the canopy, but there was little other evidence of the hamlets and roads that my atlas showed sprinkled through these foothills of eastern […]

In our FBO Spotlight series, we’re highlighting FBOs around the country that have received rave reviews from our readers. This latest Spotlight is brought to you by Mike Berman, who recently flew into Morristown Municipal Airport in Morristown, New Jersey, in a Lear 55. Here’s what he had to say about one of the airport’s […]

A close call between a drone and an airliner nine years ago is getting renewed attention thanks to an online video showing the near collision. The footage, taken by the EMT Luna X-2000 drone, shows the unmanned aerial vehicle passing just meters beneath the wing of an Ariana Afghan Airlines Airbus A300 in Afghanistan. The […]

A California startup is testing a new way of luring passengers with an “all you can fly” model that lets members travel between select city pairs aboard a Pilatus PC-12 for a flat monthly fee of $1,650. Surf Air plans to link four California cities starting on June 12 as service between San Francisco, Monterey, […]

By now you’ve probably heard that the FAA wants the Experimental Aircraft Association to foot the cost for air traffic controllers at this summer’s EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin – to the tune of about $500,000. Not surprisingly, EAA is hopping mad. In a normal year this request would be ludicrous. After all, pilots who […]

We’ve all trained for emergencies that we think of as unlikely but know can happen. In singles, one of the most feared and often discussed is an engine failure, especially in the moments after takeoff with the runway inconveniently behind us. During engine-out practice, we climb to a safe altitude, pull the power to idle, […]

Residents of an apartment building in Herndon, Virginia, got a rude surprise on Thursday night as a Cessna 177 Cardinal crashed into their living room around midnight. The residents were asleep at the time of the crash in bedrooms adjacent to the living room when the airplane entered through the roof of the three story […]

I was impressed when I read of the exploits of Bill ­Harrelson, the Virginia pilot who on March 1 flew his ­Lancair IV nonstop from Guam, in the western Pacific, to Jacksonville, Florida. The hop, if you can call it that, of about 8,000 statute miles took 38 and a half hours. If that weren’t […]

Four people were killed in a midair collision involving two single-engine aircraft near Deer Valley Airport in Phoenix Friday morning. While initial details on the fatal accident remain slim, a pilot reportedly witnessed the two aircraft collide around 10 a.m. MST about 15 miles west-northwest of the busy GA airport. By the time emergency crews […]