Search Results for: vfr

Learn how to use a home flight simulator to practice and improve your VFR skills.

We’ve long maintained that weather poses the greatest risk on any given day to a proficient pilot flying a well-maintained aircraft. Presuming there’s adequate fuel aboard and the pilot knows how to ensure that it gets to the engine(s), it’s more likely than not that the flight will be completed pretty much as planned. Everything […]

The takeoff and departure flight phase can be one of the more risky among instrument procedures, especially at night in IMC. On one hand, the pilot is abruptly transitioning from a presumably well-lit runway and airport environment to flying on instruments near terrain. On another hand, the airplane may not be up to the task, […]

It would appear cooler heads are now negotiating the transition of East Hampton’s airport from a public to private prior permission required facility and the date has been pushed back a few months. The resort town’s board of supervisors have now set May 19 to go private and say the airport won’t have instrument procedures […]

Flying is a great joy. There is plenty of airspace on the planet for all of us to go our own way and still have miles between us and another aircraft. You could probably say the same thing about driving if we didn’t have to follow the roads. But similarly, a good portion of us […]

I sometimes like to affect a look of wide-eyed, engaged curiosity to hide my usual jaded seen-it-all worldliness so as not to appear too enthusiastic. I could probably work that sentence a little more but I’m sure you get the gist. But even I will admit to some surprise at the rumble last week’s video […]

Air traffic control offers a smorgasbord of mostly legal ways to run the scud without running from the law. We’ll consider four procedures that blend IFR with VFR to expand system utility. They are: Visual approach, contact approach, VFR-on-top (OTP), and special VFR (SVFR). That last sounds like an item on the Airport Cafe menu: […]

Continued VFR-into-IMC followed by spatial disorientation caused the crash of a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter that killed basketball star Kobe Bryant and eight others in January 2020, according to NTSB findings revealed at the probable cause hearing on Tuesday. Contributing to the crash were the pilot’s self-induced pressure to complete the flight and the charter company’s […]

The only time I’ve used Special VFR “in anger” goes back some 20 years, to a less-than-perfect day at a towered airport. I was set to depart the following day, on a mission to ferry a familiar airplane from one coast to the other. At the time, I hadn’t flown the airplane in a couple […]

Island Express, the aircraft charter company that owned the Sikorsky S-76 helicopter that impacted a hillside in Calabasas, California, on Sunday killing all nine people onboard including retired NBA star Kobe Bryant, is a VFR-only operation, according to information from the NTSB and a former company employee. As previously reported by AVweb, the Part 135 […]