Pilot Proficiency

Having read about and studied the North American P-51 Mustang for as long as I can remember, how on earth could I have been surprised by anything when I had the opportunity to fly it? I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that most of those other writers were so used […]

Each month, Flying answers questions about the new Sport Pilot/Light Sport Aircraft rule with assistance from the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA), the authority on the opportunities available within the category commonly known as “Sport Pilot”: Q: I have two questions regarding light-sport aircraft: Is a 1976 Cessna 150 with a 100 hp engine eligible as […]

As you’ve doubtless heard, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B, long spoken of as the surveillance system of the future, is officially here. In late May the FAA published the final rule, though, fortunately, it will be years before you need to do anything about it. If you think of ADS-B as being like a transponder, […]

Until last weekend, the last time I’d had a mettwurst was 1987. What, you might ask, is a mettwurst? Ah. It’s a spicy, little-known relative of the bratwurst that’s only available, as far as I’ve ever determined, in a small radius around southern Ohio. I mention the mettwurst only because sometimes, like the smell of […]

The bright, very bright, sunlight flickered through the Mercury Tracer’s side window making a strobe light effect. The snow was piled high on the sides of the road and the sunlight on the snow was overwhelming my sunglasses. As I drove down the 19-degree hill, in the 19-degree weather, the combination of frost on the […]

The simple logbook entry read “installed rectifier in alternator test circuit, flight tested OK.” We’d had a problem with our alternator-out light that was corrected on a Monday prior to a flight planned for Saturday. The briefer was right; we arrived at our hangar at Lee Gilmer Memorial (GVL) in Gainesville, Georgia, with less than […]

I recently received an interesting message from Kevin Recker, who is a senior engineering manager for General Dynamics in Scottsdale, Arizona. The group he leads has built space flight hardware for the Viking missions, the Apollo Program, the International Space Station and the Mars Rovers. The equipment it builds has to be right and can’t […]

Contempt and awe seldom wed, but height may make a match between them. One of the intermittent rewards of flying is the thought-provoking perspective it provides: We look down upon great cities reduced to anonymous gray smudges, or the lights of a solitary car speeding alone at midnight across a canvas of black velvet. The […]

In the early ’60s, when I went wrong and started hanging out at the aerodrome, common wisdom was that the DC-3, while a grand old airplane, had outlived its usefulness to the military, the airlines and even corporate operators. Its death knell was tolling to signal the time had come to relegate these antiques to […]

We’ve all been asked, “Isn’t flying little airplanes risky?” And we all have our own answers. If you’ve been using the old chestnut, “It’s safer than driving to the airport,” then you’ve been cheating, at least a little bit. No, statistically, flying light aircraft is much riskier than driving a car. But it is true […]