Pilots

Some ’specially fun flying recently: a ride in EAA’s B-17, a DC-3 I brought back home to Hamilton, Ohio, from where it had flown for many years as a freighter, and then a Cessna 195 I took from Hillsboro, Ohio, to Port Clinton on Lake Erie. I rode back to Lunken Airport from Hamilton in […]

“Stop, you’re getting your head down. Tell the pilot monitoring what you need. You seem to want to do everything by yourself.” So said Capt. Andy when I was the pilot flying early in my tenure on the Cessna Citation CJ3 at JetSuite. He was right. Up until then, all my flying had been single […]

It’s been said that there is no such thing as a perfect flight. I know I’ve never come close. On most flights I can admit to some minor imperfection even before engine start. Though I’d like to think that none of these common omissions or out of sequence commissions are dangerous, I can think of […]

I was doing a play in Chicago in the early 70s. Two of the cast members were William H. Macy and Mike Nussbaum. Macy’s dad, Bill Sr., had flown B-17s in World War II, 306th Bomb Group, 423rd Squadron. Thirty-five missions in Europe, recipient of the Silver Star. Bill Jr. inherited his dad’s flight jacket, […]

Jean-Claude was in the left seat. He was senior to me, but I was flying. We were near the equator, where Mermoz and Guillaumet had once flown — but they, poor fellows, had not been at 35,000 feet! We entered the clouds at what looked like a soft spot in a squall line. At first […]

Many of us are convinced that our smartphones and other connected devices listen to our every word and can serve us ads based on the keywords we utter. Now, a similar eavesdropping concept could be coming to the flight deck as airlines look at artificial intelligence-enabled technologies that can listen to pilot conversations, store the […]

Men still outnumber women in the aviation industry. They make up less than 10 percent of the pilot workforce for example. Hillary O’Connor Mueri chief legal officer for Intrepid Analytics led a session at last week’s NBAA Convention to examine the attitudes regarding women in the business, as well as a discussion of both why […]

The pilot shortage sweeping through the regional airline industry has also been partially responsible for a shortage of available flight instructors. Buried inside the data on that shortage is the realization that we’re also short of designated pilot examiners, mostly the local CFIs given the nod by the FAA to deliver checkrides on behalf of […]

For Trae Lefan’s 15th birthday, his parents got him a discovery flight in a Cessna 172, and that was all he needed to realize that this was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. Today, the father of two is an airline pilot with ExpressJet, and while the road to becoming […]

“It totally changed my life,” Genesah Duffy says of her first flight. “The best experience I’ve ever had.” She was 25 when she took a discovery flight in a Cessna 172 out of St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport, and from there she was hooked. Genesah started out as a parts manager at Propellerhead Aviation, and she […]