Features

By Scott Spangler With all the kits available, why did Art Zemon choose a 50-year-old design? It’s a question he gets often, usually followed by “Are you nuts?” The BD-4 “is not pretty,” said the 59-year-old computer engineer based at the St. Charles County Airport west of St. Louis, Missouri. “It looks like the box […]

We were following the Lake Ontario shoreline north toward Billy Bishop Toronto City airport on Toronto Island near downtown Toronto. On frequency we heard the following. Toronto Terminal: “Piper 1234, turn heading 110, vector for traffic.” Piper 1234: “Oooh no! I’m not going out over the water—I’ve only got one spinney thing!” Toronto Terminal: “Piper […]

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 […]

Bad Rules Undermine Credibility Of Regulators Good article, Russ, but I must take issue with your title: “Bad Rules Undermine Credibility of Regulators”. The insinuation is that BasicMed is a bad rule, when most contend it is the opposite. Yes, it has its issues, but those are mainly due to the haphazard way in which […]

History tells us that the only constants in the wake of a natural disaster or enemy attack are confusion, anger and a grim determination to fight back. Its victims and their leaders face the need to make decisions and act despite a nearly crippling lack of information, unreliable eyewitness statements, rumors and pronouncements by self-proclaimed […]

Engine failures are the stuff of nightmares. Maybe not quite so agita-inducing as your mechanic calling with a compression report, but worrisome nonetheless, even if aircraft engines are designed with reliability in mind. So are they reliable? Well, yes, if you let them be by slaking them with gas and oil, following the procedures written […]

Experimental aviation, full of trendsetters and outliers though it definitely is, often follows a predictable path. Companies come and companies go. Aircraft designs are born, succeed, evolve, die. Tastes change in our world, though, and it should be noted, the overall gravity of Van’s Aircraft’s success creates both an expectation of supply and support, but […]

A few years ago, my wife and I were scooting along in our 1973 Cessna 182 from Visalia, California (KVIS) back home to Hubbard, Oregon (7S9) at 10,500 in VFR conditions. We were enjoying the ride having passed Mount Lassen on our right and Shasta Lake on our left, when Center called: Oakland Center: “November […]

If the primary yardstick determining what constitutes a “bad” landing is the number and magnitude of its bounces, my worst landing ever was in a Cessna 182 at a beachside airport in North Carolina, with all the seats filled. I dropped it in pretty good, and the airplane’s eloquent reflection of my ineptitude resulted in […]

Many years ago as an instrument rated private pilot, I had the opportunity to take a mountain flying course in the Colorado High Country. Fort Collins-Loveland Municipal Airport, known today as Northern Colorado Regional Airport, was home to a Designated Pilot Examiner who knew every mountain peak and valley south of Cheyenne. After several days […]