Search Results for: vfr

On a warm summer afternoon, a two-ship flight consisting of a Beech A-36 Bonanza and a Piper PA-31 Navajo lifted off from Newport, Rhode Island. One made it through a looming storm; one didn’t. Short Trip The two airplanes made a gradual right turn to the southwest out over the grayish-blue waters of Rhode Island […]

We were at 7,000 feet, in and out of clouds, destination a VFR-only airport. Thinking it might be hard to get below the clouds as we continued toward our destination, given the controllers’ MVA, and knowing there was a reasonable ceiling beneath the clouds now that we were past the mountains, I cancelled IFR and […]

FAA To Require Secondary Flight Deck Barrier This is a response to 9/11. It’s sobering to think that new college students (and even 19-year-olds) today do not remember this event: to them, it is something they learned about in history class and from their parents. By the time this rule change is implemented, many FOs […]

Starting with the June 15 release, FAA enroute IFR charts, low and high altitude, will lack much of the customary flight information in foreign airspace bordering the U.S. The decision was announced in a May 23 Charting Notice and publicized by the FAA on Saturday in a safety memo to a subscriber list. The agency […]

More than 2,000 flights were delayed and more than 100 canceled in New York and other northeast airports on Wednesday because of the smoke that is enveloping a big swath of the country. Huge wildfires in Quebec and a stubborn high-pressure system set up over the middle of the continent have resulted in some of […]

“Some wounds never heal, and for me it was the Honda Mini Trail I couldn’t have,” says seven-time Reno Sport class champion Jeff LaVelle. “It was $280 back then and it might as well have been $280 million.” And so began Jeff’s obsession with speed and freedom and winning and, eventually, airplanes. He couldn’t swing […]

42 teams are set to compete in the 46th annual Air Race Classic (ARC) all-women cross-country airplane race. Covering a 2,684-statute mile course, the race will begin at North Dakota’s Grand Forks International Airport (GFK) and finish at Miami Homestead General Aviation Airport (X51) in Homestead, Florida with nine intermediate checkpoints. The event, which traces […]

It’s not fun trying to make a left turn out of my neighborhood. It exits onto a busy, six-lane road. There’s no traffic light, just a gap in the median. Cutting across steady traffic demands patience, timing, and good judgment. Mistakes can be costly. The asphalt is littered with shrapnel from cars whose owners tried […]

There’s so much buzz around the emergence of electric airplanes that it’s easy to forget what animates most of the enterprise is press releases. New airplane announcements fly fast and furious; the airplanes themselves, not so much. Cutting through this background noise is the innovative Slovenian company, Pipistrel. In 2020, as it promised it would, […]

I’m going to go out on a fairly stout limb with this statement: No pilot ever plans to become an accident statistic. Instead, we all approach every flight in the firm belief it will be successful or we don’t fly. Too often, of course, events conspire against us—or we screw up—and the flight’s outcome isn’t […]