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A monthly summary of recently published NTSB preliminary accident reports involving general aviation and air carrier aircraft.

Enduring a black-screen episode in flight, for those in the know, isn’t as bad as it sounds. While the thought of losing a moving color map is often the modern pilot’s horror-movie nightmare, most cockpits now have enough backup equipment so you can fly the airplane, navigate and (barring a full electrical failure) communicate. Do […]

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When traveling via personal piston airplane without so much as a heated prop, we know the drill if there’s airframe ice: Get an immediate route amendment, an altitude change, or both. Escape icing conditions or at least keep the problem from getting worse, then work on a diversion if needed. Just remember that there are […]

What should you do when you’re flying along and waiting for a very important transmission from ATC but you don’t get it on time, or even minutes after? Or perhaps you notice something that sounds off or that you are not sure about. When you figure out that something needs be said, what exactly do […]

Only the Frequency Differs Answer 5 to the Quiz in February 2021 explains that “[f]iber-optic communication is light and not electromagnetic.” James Clerk Maxwell would disagree. Radio waves, light, and x-rays are all the same thing, just at different frequencies. (I don’t dispute that the light signal in the fiber-optical cable is unaffected by space […]

The plane was configured for landing with full flaps, a rich-enough mixture and the prop set for high RPM. I was decelerating from crossing the fence at 70 KIAS. As I pulled off some of the remaining power and began to flare, the bottom fell out about 25 feet above the runway. I already had established a nose-up attitude for the tricycle-gear airplanes touchdown, but our descent rate suddenly increased sharply as the gusty crosswind basically disappeared at the wrong time. To compensate, I pulled back on the yoke even more, increasing our pitch attitude in the hope doing so would compensate for the sudden loss of altitude and I could salvage a smooth touchdown. But it was not to be. For the first time in a long time, I really bounced the landing. Both main struts contacted the paved runway at the same time, compressed and then extended, pushing us back in the air. There we were, maybe six or eight feet in above the runway, with idle power and decaying airspeed. What to do?

Not every threat is directly controlled by someone on the ground. Some are just lazily drifting about, riding the winds, rising into the skies on their own. Of course, I’m talking about balloons. And not just party balloons either. Large balloons are used in many scientific fields, including meteorological research. An estimated 90,000 free balloons […]

The article covered how procedures can be unavailable for alternate planning, but what about those that are available, but require non-standard alternate minimums? The standard alternate minimums are simple: 600-2 for precision approaches, and 800-2 for non-precision approaches. But non-standard alternate minimums can seem quite complicated. Non-standard alternate ceilings and/or visibilities are published for an […]