Search Results for: vfr

Winteris finally getting a grip here at the virtual airport. Airplane owners aresniffing the air and have set up engine heaters. Lots of hangars have airplanesplugged into wall sockets, as owners hope their steeds will start on the coldmornings without damaging the engine. The regulars here at the Lounge arestarting to look forward to our […]

Aletter from a reader who had an unpleasant experience at a non-towered airportprompted this column. He wrote the following account: I was recently making a straight-in final to a non-towered airport. Monitoring the Unicom frequency, I was aware of another airplane in the pattern flying touch-and-goes with a student. Since I was approaching from the […]

I suspect Cap’n Jepp is rolling in hisgrave over the latest Briefing Bulletin – Vertical Navigation (VNAV), dated 12 NOV 99 -from Jeppesen in Denver. Not that it’s Jeppesen’s fault; they’re just charting the latestindustry foolishness. But Captain E. B. Jeppesen was an airman of the old school, and Ibelieve he would have rejected VNAV […]

Whenthe United States was celebrating its 200th anniversary back in 1976, theChairperson of the Ninety-Nines asked Fay Gillis Wells, one of the originalorganizing founders of the Ninety-Nines,to come up with an idea to participate in the celebration. Fay’s answer was theInternational Forest of Friendship. Fay, who has outstanding skills at gettingpeople to do things, somehow […]

ExcitementAnd Growth Still Energize General Aviation’s Hard-Core Hardy Anyone who arrived a day early for AOPA’s 60th Anniversary convention,Expo ’99, got a near-identical taste of what early arrivals experienced going toAtlanta the week before the NBAA Convention: low ceilings, soggy skies, and morerain than the runway drains could handle at Atlantic City International Airport(ACY). (Of […]

WhileI was at EAA AirVenture ’99 at Oshkosh this year, I ran into a friend of minenamed W. Roger Mullins, better known as Judge Mullins. For those of you who maynot remember or know, he’s the Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) for the NationalTransportation Safety Board (NTSB) who restored Bob Hoover’s medical certificatewhen the FAA first […]

It’sbeen a very satisfying month in the Pilot’s Lounge. Summer is spooling down andthe temperatures are dropping, so our airplanes are actually starting to performon takeoff. Dave, tail wheel pilot, one of the Lounge regulars, and owner of aHusky, just passed his check ride for his instrument rating. Doing such a ratingin a tandem, tail […]

Al Haynes was born in Dallas, Texas, in1932. After four years in the Navy he joined United Airlines, where he rose through theranks for the next 35 years. He never aspired to be a test pilot, but he became one onJuly 19, 1989, enroute from Denver to Chicago. That’s when a 12″ pie-shaped sectionof fanblade […]

Warbirds Collide Corsair Pilot Critical EAA AirVenture officials do what they can to make their event safe, thencross their fingers and pray for luck. That luck ran low Thursday afternoon asthe warbirds were taking to the air for the daily airshow. As a formation ofBearcats and Corsairs started their takeoff roll, something went terribly wrong.Thousands […]

“Sayyour altitude?” No other three-word snippet of ATC phraseology strikes such fear into the heart of apilot. You know you’re in radar contact, that you’re squawking Mode C, that yourtransponder reply light is bright enough to read by, and that the controller knowsperfectly well what your altitude is. “Say your altitude?” is ATC rhetoric for”both […]