Pilot Proficiency

I have been a motorcycle road racer for many years. Picture closed circuits and leather suits with knee sliders. The kind of gear that protects you when you lean over and press your knee into the asphalt at triple-digit speeds. I love road racing, and crashing is part of the game. I have done so […]

Like a good marriage, an abiding love for aviation grows and changes over the years. The emotion is always there, but the reason for the initial attraction isn’t always the same reason you stay committed. I was fortunate to fall in love with aviation as a kid while riding around in the back of my […]

My grandparents were Eastern European Jews, and I am the grandchild of immigrants. They came here with nothing. The civilization from which they came was destroyed by the Nazis, so, growing up in the 1950s, there were virtually no physical artifacts of my family’s long European existence. Most of the houses of my contemporaries (all […]

The FAA’s Chicago Aircraft Certification Branch posted an aviation maintenance update late Tuesday for both the Cirrus SR-20 and SR-22 resulting from the investigation into a near-fatal accident at Houston Executive Airport in Katy Texas in May of 2018. The pilot of the Cirrus SR-20 involved in the accident reported shortly after takeoff, that he […]

It’s sunny and 83 degrees with a light breeze in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, as I write this; the only sign that Christmas is fast approaching are the multicolored lights strung in Windbird’s rigging and occasional faint notes of familiar holiday tunes drifting across the water. I wish I could report that Dawn and […]

The airplane looked absolutely the same. It was the same Piper Arrow II with the blue-and-silver accent ribbon that flowed from the tail to the nose against a white background. It was the same airplane that was displayed on almost 200 hours of my logbook pages. I smiled knowing that my former career as an […]

The voice behind me was a familiar one: “You pilots love your toys, don’t you?” I turned around in the coffee shop to see my neighbor’s smiling face staring at the flight-simulation app I was playing on my iPhone. I smiled and nodded as the wave of his hand said, “Go back to your game.” […]

The Grand Bahamas Inter- national airport (MYGF) in Freeport, Bahamas, a privately owned facility, is frequented by nearly a dozen airlines including Delta, Delta Connection, American Eagle, Silver Airways and Bahamasair operating a variety aircraft types. Because tourism is the primary economic driver, be on the lookout for plenty of aircraft in the area from […]

This year’s NTSB Most Wanted List included a few changes from the 2017-2018 edition. Noticeably missing from the 2019 list was loss of control inflight, an issue that remains the top killer in aviation. The NTSB Most Wanted List was created as the Board’s primary advocacy tool to identify top safety improvements that can be […]

If you started flying before the iPad was introduced in 2010 or, even longer ago, before the early 2000s, when aviation-specific portable-flight-bag tablets first entered the market, you remember the days when you got a workout each time you went flying from carrying a hefty bag filled with paper charts, plotters, instrument approach plates and […]