Pilot Proficiency

On June 20, Wally Funk launched into space, fulfilling a quest she had pursued for her entire life. But the main buzz wasn’t about Wally’s achievement, but the means by which she got there at last—as a guest of one of the world’s wealthiest people, Jeff Bezos, aboard the Blue Origin rocket, in New Shepard. […]

“We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup… And I […]

It was a dark and stormy night; my electrical system had failed, and the battery was dead. Descending lower and lower in the murk, looking for familiar landmarks, I saw—dead ahead—the magnificent Jeremiah Morrow Bridge spanning the Little Miami River on Ohio’s Interstate 71. My only option was to fly beneath that high-and-wide span and […]

As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the United States Air Force’s most senior uniformed officer, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. is responsible for the organization, training and equipping of 689,000 active-duty National Guard, Reserve and civilian forces serving in the US and overseas. A military adviser to the secretary of defense, […]

As a longtime contributor to Flying, I have been blessed with the good fortune of attending many events, including airshows. Having spent a career mostly mastering the art of straight-and-level flight in the stratosphere, I have tremendous admiration for the aviators that perform physics-defying maneuvers at stepladder altitudes. I am awed by the skills involved. […]

A novice pilot mixes up his airplanes, leading to tragic consequences.

Many years ago, a friend landed and left his Cessna 172 in Louisville, Kentucky, because of weather, an hour and half away from our home-base airport in Madisonville. He was far too busy in his business to go back and fly it home anytime soon. As a newly minted 17-year-old private pilot, I jumped at […]

At EAA AirVenture 2021 this week, Redbird Flight Simulations will demo its new Redbird Pro app that’s under development, which will eventually incorporate stories from Flying’s legendary ILAFFT series and instrument-pilot-focused content from Flying’s Chart Wise, along with other aviation safety providers. The new app is aimed directly at those GA pilots—most of us—who don’t […]

“You don’t know how other people live,” my brother said. He was not technically correct. We do know how other people live; we just don’t live that way. We were not exactly sure what he meant. There are a lot of things we don’t do like other people do—for instance, we certainly aren’t stylish dressers. […]

RNP stands for “required navigational performance,” and it indicates a special level of RNAV instrument approach made possible by a collective effort between the approach designer—in this case, Honeywell—the operator, the airport, and the FAA. Alaska Airlines was an early pioneer of the concept, which helped open up airports in its route structure such as […]