Features

Almost home to Lancaster, NY, after a long (for me) flight from Charlottesville, VA, I wanted to find out if anyone was on the ground at Lancaster: Me: “Lancaster Unicorn … Lancaster Unicorn”—I actually said it wrong twice—“Lancaster Unicom! Piper One Seven Two Mike Echo …” Sadly, no one got to enjoy this with me. […]

Wanna Bomber Thrill Ride? Sign The Waiver Paul B…an interesting article. However, I question the term bombers in the statistics. Since 1982, the FAA has investigated 22 WWII era bomber accidents. That implies B-17’s, B-25’s, B-24’s, B-26’s. But it seems to me the total number of flyable WWII bombers would be hard pressed to total […]

Not all flight reviews are equal, and rusty pilots are not at all uncommon, but I recently faced a scenario that gave me pause. It read like the beginning of an NTSB report with a stack of extremely novel circumstances. My choice was either be one of the contributing factors to an accident or one […]

Overheard just after landing at Austin, Texas: Cessna 0DS: “Austin Tower, Cessna Five Seven Zero Delta Sierra, ready for departure.” No response for a short time. Tower: “Was that American Twelve Sixty‑one calling?” Cessna 0DS: “I wish. No, it was Cessna Five Seven Zero Delta Sierra.” Unidentified: “Be careful what you wish for.” Scott McCartney […]

I like to fly at night. The air generally is smoother, there’s less traffic, the ATC frequencies are not as busy and ground illumination, the moon and the stars can compete in one of the best light shows you’ll ever see. Of course, humans were never meant to fly in the first place, and we […]

Boeing 737 MAX Do we (meaning Boeing) know how often the MCAS was actually activated in airline service? It is my understanding that Boeing intended for MCAS activation to be exceedingly rare and “Invisible” to the PIC. I assume it is possible to determine how many times MCAS was activated world-wide and under what circumstances. […]

It’s aviation’s Everest: the highest rating, the toughest to obtain and necessary to have to fly in the Part 121 airline world, and even in some portions of the Part 135 air taxi world. In reality, if you want to fly for a living, the chances are almost unity that you’ll need to hold an […]

Recently, I was giving an IPC to a friend in his J model Mooney. We decided to fly the Boca Raton (KBCT) VOR‑A approach using GPS for the final approach segment (FAS). The approach starts at the Palm Beach (PBI) VORTAC and the FAS is 17.7 NM long. We were north and outside 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 […]

Are Pilot Skills Worse Than Ever? A lot of places where pilot skills are down are places where we won’t expect to see accident rates rise until much later. These are big flight schools pumping out new pilots for airlines to put in the right-hand seat. These pilots are not in command of aircraft themselves […]