Pilot Proficiency

Boneyards – the graveyards of worn out airplanes – are generally depressing collections of airplanes whose useful life has come and gone. But art aficionado and gallery owner Eric Firestone saw these airplanes as an opportunity to create something beautiful. Along with curator Carlo McCormick, Firestone conceived The Boneyard Project, which put retired historical airplanes […]

The details of the near disaster are chilling. A Cessna 172 and an Embraer Regional Jet at Biloxi-Gulfport International Airport in Mississippi were cleared to take off on runways with intersecting departure paths only moments apart. On departure they missed each other, thank goodness, but only by a couple of hundred feet horizontally and by […]

The first solo flight is undoubtedly a moment that you will never forget. Even though you may have seen the earth from above many times before, the experience of reaching that perspective alone is different. And because it is literally a groundbreaking moment, you’ll want to do everything you can to make it positive and […]

Remember that online petition asking the White House to abandon its $100 per flight user fee proposal? More than 9,000 of you signed it, prompting the government to consider the issue and write a response. Authored by Dana Hyde, a Washington bureaucrat with the bureaucratic-sounding job title Associate Director for General Government Programs for the […]

(January 2012) The news cycle is like a carousel whose riders are ever changing. For a brief moment in September, the Green Flight Challenge swept past: NASA handed a prize of $1.35 million to an airplane that had achieved an efficiency of 400 passenger-miles per gallon. Huh? said the world — and then along came […]

(January 2012) Some time back, Congress decided that the FAA’s goals were just downright incompatible. How could a federally mandated regulatory agency “encourage and develop civil aeronautics” while enforcing the regulations and exercising its authority to levy fines and suspend or revoke certificates? So guess which functions were eliminated? Washington also reminded the agency that […]

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 John “Randy” Olson, who recently flew one of Alexandria Aviation’s Piper Warriors and has nothing but good things to say about the experience. Alexandria Aviation (KAXN) Alexandria, Minnesota […]

(January 2012) The history of powered flight is short. So short that A.L. Ueltschi has lived during most of it. Ueltschi is, of course, the founder of FlightSafety International. The company is perhaps one of the most emblematic of the exponential growth of aviation; as airplanes became more sophisticated and pilots were asked to understand […]

I just got back from a roundtrip flight to Central Florida for a speaking engagement, and even after all these years of flying 1,000-nm trips in light airplanes, I was still surprised by how starkly different the “out” and the “back” legs were. This is one important lesson about transportation flying that no one ever […]

These days, insurance companies have become savvy about the level of pilot experience that decreases the chances of an accident. They often require a minimum number of hours in a type of airplane before you can fly it solo and still be covered. But if you want to increase safety and ensure that you know […]