Pilot Proficiency

My wife and I stood up from the couch in the well-appointed office and shook hands with National Transportation Safety Board chairman Robert Sumwalt. We thanked him for taking the time to squeeze a visit into his packed schedule. The visit was the culmination of our personalized tour at NTSB headquarters, an opportunity not often […]

When I earned my private ticket in 1960, jet aircraft were still rather rare, even in the San Fernando Valley. My home field, Whiteman Air Park in Pacoima, California, was near Van Nuys and Lockheed airports, both of which were busy commercial fields. The local landing and departing traffic was mainly at piston-engine airspeeds, which […]

“Richard, you have failed this portion of the check ride. You will not be getting a type rating today.” My first thought was the designated examiner had made a mistake. “You have had full needle deflection twice on this approach,” he explained. I was dumbfounded. I had not seen full needle deflection — not once […]

As Steve Thorne told us recently, out of all the aircraft he has already flown and would love to fly, no plane comes close to a Spitfire for him. That one is clearly at the top of his “bucket list.” Still, that doesn’t mean there aren’t more aircraft on his list, and as a result […]

Although the Morristown Six could easily be confused with a ’60s rock-and-roll band, the name actually applies to a standard instrument departure procedure, also known as a SID. SIDs look and feel different from traditional approach procedures, often including far more information arranged in a complex layout some pilots might find confusing. Air traffic control […]

For this Throwback Thursday edition of Flight Chops, we’re going back to 2016 for a really cool example of how being an aviation YouTube celebrity leads to some pretty awesome adventures. Or, in this case, how two aviation YouTube celebrities received the opportunity to undergo U.S. Coast Guard training because they have some fans in […]

For this week’s Flight Chops throwback, we’re sharing a particularly funny video from 2014 about “the good, the bad and the barfing” of flying with passengers. As everyone’s favorite weekend warrior pilot Steve Thorne explained, “This video is really just about sharing experiences, both mine and some of my friends, kind of starting the conversation […]

On August 30, 2016, at 1801 Pacific daylight time, a Beechcraft A36 Bonanza was destroyed when it impacted the ground in a near vertical descent, likely as a result of a wake turbulence encounter on approach to landing at Reno-Tahoe International Airport in Reno, Nevada. The thing that caught my attention was that the pilot […]

Maybe it’s because I’ve screwed up more than most (living) pilots, but I often get calls from angry, confused or worried aviators: “Fiddling with my iPad and taxied across a hold-short line”; “Didn’t check notams and flew through a TFR”; “Assumed the other guy was PIC”; “Forgot about my flight-review (annual, physical, etc.) date”; “Blew […]

Imagine I asked you the following question during your next flight review: If you had the choice, would you rather fly directly through a line of embedded thunderstorms along your planned route of flight or use datalink radar imagery on your iPad to deviate around the weather system? You’d probably take a curious look at […]