Pilot Proficiency

If you don’t venture on sullen skies, You never come to sunkissed valleys. If your palms have never been moist, Your heart has never thrilled. If you have never been afraid, You have never been courageous. Gill Robb Wilson, The Airman’s World When my sister Mary and I started flying, we learned to check aviation […]

(November 2011) Opening scene: Inside a B777 cockpit approximately 250 miles off the eastern coastline of Japan. The first officer is massaging the right touch pad of the display unit with his index finger. The cursor arrow hovers in the vicinity of the emergency checklist page now shown on the lower EICAS (engine instrument and […]

(November 2011) In November 1954, having accumulated a bit more than 26 solo hours flying 65 hp Cubs and Aeroncas, and having become an aircraft owner several months before, I was supremely confident in my flying abilities. Nevertheless I deferred to my medical school classmate, Ed, a veteran, older by 10 years than most others […]

Can’t stop playing Microsoft Flight Simulator X? Meet OVO-4, a product from Spanish manufacturer Virtual Fly that takes home flight simulation to a whole new level. According to Virtual Fly, OVO-4 is a single-seat enclosed cockpit intended for home use that provides complete movement capabilities, vibration systems, smart lighting and speakers meant to mimic real […]

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 Thomas O’Donnell, who recently flew into Sonoma County Airport in a Cessna 182. Here’s what he has to say about one of the airport’s FBOs, KaiserAir. KaiserAir (KSTS) […]

As more and more pilots get their training at large, controlled airports with long, flat, paved runways, fewer new pilots have much, if any, real-world experience dealing with sloping runways. Even some seasoned pilots experience problems at a new airport with a runway of a different size or slope than what they’re used to. One […]

A single-engine accident in Florida recently in which two people died shortly after takeoff reminded me of another high-performance single-engine airplane accident that happened at Santa Monica airport in 2009. A SIAI-Marchetti SF-260C crashed onto the runway shortly after taking off, killing two people onboard. I’m not suggesting that the cause of the accidents were […]

On Tuesday Redbird Flight Simulations took the next step on its meteoric growth in the GA market by cutting the ribbon on Skyport, a hybrid aviation business based in San Marcos, Texas (KHYI). The town is roughly halfway between Austin and San Antonio. The facility, which Redbird founder Jerry Gregoire refers to as a laboratory, […]

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 Carol Bailey, who flew into Hutchinson County Airport earlier this year in a Cessna 182 while on her way to the 2011 Air Race Classic. Here’s what she […]

Sitting in the jump seat of a corporate Gulfstream G450 on approach to Morristown Municipal Airport’s Runway 5, I saw the tiny starlings a fraction of a second before the copilot called out, matter-of-factly, “Birds.” We flew through an entire flock of the little creatures and, although I was pretty sure we’d hit more than […]