Pilot Proficiency

Next week’s Sun ‘n Fun event unofficially kicks off the 2010 fly-in season, and Lakeland Linder Regional Airport (KLAL) will be buzzing. For many pilots, it’s just too intimidating to even consider flying in to such a hornets’ nest. Maybe most of their flying is in rural areas where they seldom see another airplane in […]

Some people are naturally well organized and others — just aren’t. I place myself mostly in the ‘aren’t’ category, and over the years, I’ve adjusted my flying style to accommodate that element of my personal style. In the late 1980s, my friend and former colleague at Flying Eric Weiner (now the author of a bestseller […]

Blending a mix of aircraft into a traffic pattern can sometimes be a real trick — especially at busy non-tower airports. The key is to be considerate of the other aircraft around you and to try and blend in with them — speed being the usual issue. There are really two scenarios here — slow […]

The title of a short Associated Press article in a USA Today dated Nov. 30, 2009, said, “Pilots flying on empty baffle NTSB.” Tom Haueter, director of the NTSB’s Office of Aviation Safety, was quoted as saying, “It’s surprising to me that there’s a group of pilots who will knowingly push it, thinking, ‘I can […]

As I think back over my life, I can come up with only one day I remember. Really remember. Oh, I remember graduating from high school, but I don’t remember anything else about the day. I remember watching the birth of my daughter, but I have no idea what I had for breakfast on that […]

Deciding to break from my normal schedule of one flight lesson per week (or sometimes only every two weeks), usually on a Saturday or Sunday, I headed over to Vero/FlightSafety for three days last week. I ended the last of my three flights, let’s say, deflated. Really deflated. I had hit a wall (figuratively, of […]

The snow level in the Oakland hills dropped to about 1,500 feet the other day, a description that makes sense only in mountainous areas at the edges of winter, or in California pretty much all of the time. Since it’s almost never cold enough for snow to survive at sea level, snow in California is […]

You hear it all the time. “If you have any doubts at all, you shouldn’t go!” I’m here to confess, if I took that completely literally, not only would I never fly, I’d never leave the house. A measure of controlled fear is not unhealthy, especially when it comes to flying an airplane, and the […]

This was a day of contrasts. It started with my lesson in the P28. Weather looked ok at the time of briefing but had changed somewhat after we got through the preflight. A wind change meant a different runway and the direction we planned to depart toward had become “dark”. A new plan. So instead […]

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and that cliché applies more in aviation than just about any other field — with the possible exception of training attack dogs. Old Bonanzas like mine have Continental E-series engines, similar to later O-470s, but with enough differences to make operating one a constant source […]