Search Results for: vfr

We just had our annual summer cookout here at the virtual airport. It was a success—we didn’t run out of brats, burgers or beer and nobody got food poisoning. Ok, we set the success bar low, but there was an excellent turnout and folks seemed to have a good time. Better yet, because the flight […]

The fly (Musca domestica) appeared inside the Citabria’s cockpit ten minutes into what would be a 25-hour round-trip from Iowa to New York. I greeted the visitor the way Jimmy Stewart, as Charles Lindbergh, did in the 1953 film Spirit of St. Louis. And there the analogy to Lindy flying 3000 miles non-stop from a […]

I was flying southbound in the Los Angeles basin in mid‑July 2017 when I heard a VFR pilot trying to get a shortcut through the Los Angeles Class Bravo airspace. SoCal: “NXXXXX how do you plan to navigate the LA Bravo airspace?” Pilot: “SoCal I’d like to go through the Bravo, LAX direct Brown Field.” […]

The cost of new aircraft keeps going up and the number produced keeps going down, so it’s really no surprise that people have begun looking for other ways to get the benefits of a new airplane without having to pay increasingly unreachable amounts for them. Taking old planes, stripping them down and rebuilding them seems […]

Flying an RV-8 from Los Angeles, California to Oxfordshire, England in 19 days may strike many as an adventure of a lifetime. For me, the 7,000-n.m. trip was my way to return home after working four years in the Tesla Motors Design Studio in Hawthorne, California. Airfields along the Crimson Route, partially developed in WW-II […]

PilotWorkshops has released “IFR Communications,” the companion to their recently released, “VFR Communications” manual, and the latest in their Pilot-Friendly Manual series. “Many instrument pilots feel intimidated talking on the radio, especially with complex or lesser-used instrument procedures,” stated PilotWorkshops founder Mark Robidoux. “It happens to both newly minted instrument pilots, and veterans who don’t […]

Aviation has never lacked for dumb ideas. It’s what drives innovation. “Hey, Orville, wanna jump off a sand dune strapped to these really cool wings I made in the bike shop?” What seemed stupid in 1903 is recognized as pioneering genius today. Likewise, countless other notions such as flying inside clouds without reference to the […]

Back to Part 1 There are certainly worse places to be stuck than Punta Arenas. It’s quite a pleasant city with friendly folks, good food, and lots to see. After the requisite 72 hours and a lot of work on the part of the ground crew, the permit to fly to Tahiti is in hand. […]

AVweb’sGeneral Aviation Accident Bulletinis taken from the pages of our sister publication,Aviation Safetymagazine, and is published twice a month. 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 […]

Let’s call him Peter. I was his fifth flight instructor since he started learning to fly nine months earlier. He was attempting to obtain his private license within the 365-day period allowed for registered aliens living in the U.S. When we met, my first question was, “How did you go through so many instructors?” Some […]