One summer, while flying over the largest wilderness in the lower 48 states, I heard a radio call: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. White Cessna… [broken and inaudible transmission].” I heard just enough to understand something bad was happening, but not where. I repeatedly tried to hail the aircraft to get them to repeat their location, to […]

Humans are really good at rationalizing. We do it all the time, every time when we cut corners, break rules or ignore evidence in pursuit of a successful outcome. We continue because it often has no consequences. The thing about rationalizing, though, is it can change our behavior. What once seemed wrong starts to feel […]

Thinking back to my traditional aviation weather courses, I realized they didn’t address intense wind events where the agency of high wind all by itself wreaks its own special form of havoc. This year [2020] there were numerous high wind events — several haboobs in Arizona, a derecho in the Midwest, and wind-driven fires in […]

One of the great joys of flying is a routine flight. I’m not referring to a flight that went as expected, which undeniably is the greatest joy, I’m talking about flying a routine route. If you hop in your plane on a Saturday afternoon to fly to your favorite $100 hamburger location and get a […]

There is a fundamental reason we perform preflight run-ups and engine checks before takeoff: It is a whole lot better to find problems at 1G, 0 feet AGL and 0 knots airspeed than it is while airborne. Making sure a powerplant will work as we intend before taking off is just good airmanship. A good […]

Most pilots venture into windy conditions with enough skills and smarts to know how to either avoid or cope with them. But wind-related accidents are still commonplace, so clearly we don’t always get it right. One reason for this may be fairly simple: With the exception of blowing snow, tornadoes, dust devils and some cloud […]

Personal aviation opens up a world of interesting and beautiful places to visit and recreate, places that reward us for the time, training and skill to get there. Some places would be inaccessible except by horse, foot or airstrip, like the canyons, rivers and vistas of the Mountain West. Some places beckon because they offer […]

Nearly two years have passed since Aviation Safety magazine introduced the concept of gadget flight rules (GFR) in the December 2013 issue. The original article examined using non-certified gadgets-personal electronic devices running appropriate software-to salvage a flight when your certified instruments fail. The conclusion was, yes, gadgets can provide backup, but the user must understand the […]

Pilots are taught to take off and land into the wind, and avoid landing or departing with a tailwind. There is a reason: The performance penalty of a tailwind is much greater than the benefit of a headwind. How big a penalty? Go to your POH and calculate it. The most common figure is to […]

Not all flight reviews are equal, and rusty pilots are not at all uncommon, but I recently faced a scenario that gave me pause. It read like the beginning of an NTSB report with a stack of extremely novel circumstances. My choice was either be one of the contributing factors to an accident or one […]