Search Results for: vfr

Any pilot who has used a personal airplane for regular transportation has had to negotiate bad weather. By the time you accumulate more than 4500 hours of flight time, it’s likely you have dealt with a cold front or three, plus night IMC and a variety of other challenges. With that kind of flight experience […]

I’ve previously referred to scenes from Ernest K. Gann’s book “Fate Is The Hunter” in these pages. The combined autobiography and ground school traces his flying career from DC-2s over the eastern U.S., C-47s and C-87s over the North Atlantic during WWII, and DC-4s on the Honolulu/San Francisco run after the war. One of the […]

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause on the NTSB’s website at www.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after the […]

It’s not surprising that Decathlons and Citabrias rank high on the list of fun airplanes to own, and it’s not uncommon for them to be second or third airplanes parked next to the family traveler. That also means these two-place aerobats can be easy to own. And if you have a burning desire to add […]

ICARUS Devices is proud to announce that its Smart View Limiting Device for instrument flight and weather decision making training is now on sale at www.ICARUSDevices.com. The ICARUS Device uses Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystal (PDLC) film to electronically alter the pilot’s visibility, bringing the power of a simulator into the aircraft. The app allows the […]

The recent Kobe Bryant accident in low-visibility conditions and the many others like it always elicit comments similar to, “What is a helicopter doing flying in IFR weather like that?” The short answer is because they can. Flippant, but true. By and large, fixed-wing aircraft are stable platforms. Trim them up, release the controls, and they […]

During my high school years, I got a lift home from a friend. Approaching my neighborhood, I said, “Turn left here.” I expected my friend to be a sensible driver, spot the clearly marked street a few hundred feet ahead, decelerate, merge into the designated left-turn lane, look for traffic, and smoothly turn into my […]

It was a number of years ago, so it’s OK to tell the story now … Chicago Approach was famous for a lack of tolerance for VFR pilots. One controller would say things like, “Flight Following? Yeah; here ya go: turn heading 270 and call back when you’re in Iowa. I don’t have any time […]

These pages regularly urge new private pilots to go on to earn their instrument rating. Especially if you ever want to use a personal airplane for regular, reliable transportation, the rating is pretty much mandatory. If you’re content to only fly on good-weather days in search of expensive hamburgers and to abandon the peace-of-mind the […]

I was flying home to Oakland, talking to Travis Approach when they called traffic at 10 o’clock, three miles, converging, same altitude unverified. I noted the N number from ADS‑B, and did a quick look up on “N‑Numbers” on my phone. I use Post River Software, which contains the entire FAA database within the app. […]