Pilot Proficiency

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 Laura Lyne, who has flown into DeKalb-Peachtree Airport in Atlanta in a Mooney, Cessna 210, Baron and Aero Commander. Here’s what she had to say about one of […]

You’ve no doubt heard and read a lot about 3-D printing in the last couple of years. Known as “additive manufacturing” in industrial-design circles, the process is used to produce three-dimensional solid objects of virtually any shape from a digital model fed into a special kind of printer. Several teams have already created 3-D printed […]

The 77-year-old, 8,000 hour pilot-owner of a Cessna 182, accompanied by his wife, flew from Anchorage to Juneau, Alaska, on a July afternoon. The couple was in the process of moving to Hoonah, about 31 nm west-southwest of Juneau; the ostensible purpose of this trip was to position the 182 there before the start of […]

Hold on. I know the title is trite. Your enthusiasm for reading further may be at a low point, but hang on for a minute. I mean to persuade you that this is something other than a cliched rehash of admonishments to stabilize your approach. It is hard to believe that, after flying continuously for […]

Nineteen tourists were killed Monday in a hot air balloon crash near Luxor, Egypt, making it the deadliest balloon crash worldwide in decades. Details of the episode are still emerging, but the Washington Post reported that a landing cable got caught around a helium tube, which caused a fire and subsequent gas explosion. The balloon […]

Canadian TV director John Driftmier was killed on Sunday in an airplane crash while filming the second season of “Dangerous Flights,” a reality program for the Discovery Channel that follows fliers as they “risk their lives in the high-danger, high-stress business of aircraft delivery.” While little is known about the crash, it reportedly took place […]

Detailed weather conditions at airports are easy to obtain through a metar, ATIS, AWOS or ASOS. Conditions such as winds, temperatures, cloud conditions and visibilities are measured by ground-based equipment and can be obtained through frequencies, phone numbers, iPad apps and some panel-mounted avionics. But weather conditions are harder to measure in the air. That’s […]

As we passed our first waypoint of 20 degrees longitude westbound over the North Atlantic, my copilot and I studied the TCAS symbol on the navigation display. Another airplane was approaching us from behind at the 5 o’clock position. Our 777 was cruising at FL 390. The other airplane was 1,000 feet below at FL […]

There’s now an easier way to browse NTSB reports. Aircraft Incidents is a new online source for aviation accidents. The website contains the entire database of NTSB reports and allows readers to narrow their searches by various criteria, including categories such as “Top 10 Airlines” and “Top 10 Aircraft.” It also breaks down the data […]

Sarah Yensen and Ted Lester, pilots who have been dating for several years and who have flown together to Oshkosh from the Boston area six different times, recently had what Yensen described as an “in-flight incident” for which she determined there was no checklist. Yensen, who works at Lincoln Labs, and Lester, who works at […]