Pilot Proficiency

May 1-31 is Learn to Fly month, a month-long effort to help flight training providers attract new pilots. This year, the drum beat is even louder than in the past as the shortage of career pilots continues to make news. Of course, Learn to Fly month doesn’t focus only on career aviators. The efforts will […]

Aircraft ownership is expensive. Between fuel, insurance, hangar or tiedown expenses and possibly a loan payment, by the time you get to the annual inspection, there’s a temptation to do it as cheaply as possible — to do the minimum and skip preventive maintenance actions. Occasionally, aircraft owners will even admit such things to friends […]

Earlier today at the Aero Friedrichshafen expo in Germany, ForeFlight announced that it is introducing its popular aviation app to the European market. The app will be available in Europe later this summer. “We are combining an array of high-quality European data, our Eurocontrol-integrated flight planning and filing capabilities, and a broad suite of navigation […]

Pilots are imperfect by design. We’re human, after all. On any given flight, a pilot is faced with dozens of interrelated decisions that guide the airplane to its destination, hopefully intact and without incident. Most of the time, we make good decisions and our flights end safely, even if we execute some elements of the […]

The days learning about flying from John and Martha King by watching VHS tapes are long gone, but after more than 40 years evolving their pilot courses, King Schools has said goodbye to physical media and is now delivering 100 percent of its pilot courses online. “We have followed two rules that have kept us […]

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University recently asked pilots in a number of certificate categories how well they understand weather information presented to them in written and graphical form. The NTSB in 2014 labeled identifying and communicating elements of hazardous weather as one of its Top 10 safety priorities, calling weather, “a frequent cause or contributing factor to […]

General aviation pilots are having problems landing their airplanes. According to the insurance industry, landing losses – accidents and incidents in which aircraft are damaged during the landing phase – continue to be a persistent issue. What’s going on here? Hang out at your local airport on a windy day and it won’t take long […]

As a newly minted flight instructor in 2002, I thought I knew it all. I could recite regulations from Part 61 and 91 from memory and anticipate my students’ mistakes before they happened. I felt like my stick-and-rudder skills were at their peak, having just wrapped up the maneuvers training for the commercial pilot certificate […]

Last Thanksgiving, instead of wrestling with turkeys and relatives (not necessarily in that order or degree of difficulty), I fibbed and told my family I’d be out of town. Actually, I’d accepted an invitation from friends who always throw a splendid “do” with a large and eclectic collection of family, friends and assorted “homeless” souls […]

A go-around from a full-flap approach is a delicate maneuver that pilots are seldom called upon to perform.