Search Results for: vfr

EASA has published its opinion on proposed regulatory easements that will help EASA-rated private pilots gain their instrument rating faster, cheaper and more easily. By clearing the path for the “Basic Instrument Rating,” EASA is combining various regulatory frameworks, allowing private pilots to gain access to instrument flying directly upon passing their EASA private pilot […]

Blame it on YouTube. Sailors have an affliction they call “bigger boat disease” or “one-foot-itis,” and I was starting to feel the rumblings of the aviator’s version. I had been flying and enjoying my Fisher FP-404 biplane for the past three years but was starting to bump into its limitations: low speed, modest climb rate, […]

Bye Aerospace’s Sun Flyer 2 electric Part 23 airplane took flight for the first time with its intended production configuration on Feb. 8 and President George Bye said all went well. The two-seat aircraft, which Bye intends to be fully certified, flew with the Siemens-built SP70D motor with a maximum of 120 horsepower and maximum […]

My brother, J.R., and I have made a number of flights to the Bahamas in one of our two airplanes. Once we had a crowd, so we took both airplanes. He was in his Cessna 182 and I was in my Cessna 206. On the return trip while crossing central Florida, near Orlando, on a […]

It was my Sunday morning to pick up the doughnuts on the way to the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport, so I wanted to get there early. If it’s your doughnut day and you show up after the regulars are already ensconced in the ratty old recliners, swilling coffee and telling flying lies, you’re […]

In another world and another age, when I lived in Connecticut, several times a year I’d hop in the Mooney and fly down to DCA, walk to the Metro, thence to the NTSB’s basement to pore over accident reports. This led quite naturally to my penchant for reducing eye-bulging, bowel-loosening fear to actual numbers so […]

Many of today’s workplaces seek to create a formalized “safety culture,” an environment where employees practice behaviors that minimize accidents, look out for their co-workers and where reporting unsafe conditions is encouraged, not subject to retaliation, and frequently rewarded. It can be a great goal, but it often creates an exaggerated sense of safety where […]

I recall an instructor, who before signing students off for the commercial checkride, would explain a few things he felt were critical when exercising commercial privileges. First, commercial pilots had to be smooth. After all, paying passengers would not be impressed if we could not fly the airplane well. Second, commercial pilots had to be […]

AVweb’sGeneral Aviation Accident Bulletinis taken from the pages of our sister publication,Aviation Safetymagazine. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause in the NTSB’s website atwww.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after the accident, although some take longer. […]

Family members of passengers killed in the 2016 crash of a Cessna 182 in Tennessee are claiming controllers should have warned the non-instrument-rated pilot he was about to hit a mountain in IMC. Pilot David Starling, his eight-year-old son Hunter and the pilot’s girlfriend Kim Smith died when the Skylane hit the cloud-shrouded 6,500-foot mountain […]