Pilot Proficiency

For a supposed airline pilot and aviation writer, I’ve spent a scandalous amount of time at sea level over the past year. In late October, my wife, Dawn, and I cast off the lines from our summer dock in the Chesapeake and pointed our 42-foot sailboat, Windbird, southward to the Caribbean. From the eye-popping waterscapes of […]

A Navion crash in November 2016 could have been avoided by breaking an old habit.

Pilot pride comes with the certificates and ratings achieved through successful checkrides. But like flying itself, maintaining one’s pilot pride properly is a never-ending effort. Human nature is an ever-present foe. Complacency replaces striving to be better on every flight, and boastful delusions take the place of yesterday’s abilities. Proper pilot pride abhors such delusions, […]

Loss of aircraft control remains the No. 1 killer of general aviation pilots, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). At an industry roundtable hosted by the NTSB at its Washington, D.C., headquarters in April, the hot topic was how better training and technology can help pilots do a better job of flying their […]

Pilots and flight instructors have a new FAA advisory circular, AC 61-98D, to guide them through both the flight reviews and instrument proficiency checks required under Part 61. This newest version of the circular addresses changes in technology and the operational environment, their impact on recurrent training and proficiency checks. The FAA added important safety […]

In an era of WAAS GPS navigation systems on board even the smallest aircraft, flying a localizer back-course approach could seem rather archaic. Indeed, for years many pilots viewed a LOC BC approach as more of an afterthought at airports, simply because the procedure was built off the back side of a full ILS system […]

This story on non-towered airports comes from Jetwhine, a blog that began in 2006 as my experiment into what was then a new world of self-publishing. In the 12 years since, Jetwhine has never failed to regularly publish a story about some aspect of the aviation industry that wasn’t available anywhere else. Few other blogs […]

As any career-minded professional with young children can attest, striking a balance between work and family life can be a challenge. For pilot and professional aviation photographer Jessica Ambats, assignments can take her anywhere in the world on short notice, not always easy to pull off with a daughter at home. In this inspiring video, […]

How cool is this: an invitation to the 15th annual Living Legends of Aviation Awards ceremony in Beverly Hills, California, from a friend — himself a living legend — whose lovely wife finds all things airplane a crashing bore (whoops, wrong adjective). Then an offer to bunk with friends in Santa Monica (instead of $300-plus […]

Writing last month’s Aftermath column about a fatal accident that resulted from the pilot’s mishandling of a balked landing, I reflected that I had never assessed the behavior of my own airplane in that maneuver. As I have said before, my idea of flight testing is to take trips and wait for something strange to […]