Features

When discussing preflight inspections, I sometimes hear pilots remark, “I don’t know what I am looking for.” That’s unfortunate, because the pilot is the final authority regarding the aircraft’s airworthiness. As a pilot, you have the responsibility to accept the aircraft as-is and be on your merry way or reject it as unsuitable if something […]

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 […]

My student and I were nearing the Class C airspace at Palm Beach International airport (KPBI). We asked for clearance. Palm Beach Approach: “Cessna Five Tango Papa, squawk 1454.” This was odd since local squawks always start with 02. But we set what we were given. Approach (about 30 seconds later): “Cessna Five Tango Pop, […]

ADS-B Apocalypse As an owner, it’s hard to justify spending $2-6K on something we DON’t NEED to fly. It’s no benefit since we already have an IFR system that functions without it and a VFR system with the lowest accident rate in history. This is a made up, government mandate where some office bureaucrat made […]

Charles Welden grew up in Alabama watching a seaplane come and go off of Lake Martin and thinking it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. He learned to fly and eventually bought a Cessna 150/150 so he could figure out flying seaplanes himself. In one of those moments that occasionally happens in aviation, he […]

Fixed-wing pilots start learning stall recognition and avoidance during pre-solo training. The private and sport pilot checkrides require recovering from developed stalls with minimal loss of altitude, and stall and spin awareness are (or at least should be) refreshed during flight reviews for the duration of one’s flying career. But unintended stalls still put dozens […]

Many VFR, and inexperienced IFR, pilots mistakenly believe that an instrument rating allows you to launch into “weather.” After all, instrument pilots have been trained to fly on the gages, so making the decision to fly into the clouds shouldn’t be difficult. Veteran IFR pilots understand the complexity of the go/no-go decision. There are weather […]

Toward the end of my flight, I had the following exchange with air traffic control: Approach Control: “N1234, expect visual approach Runway 32.” Me: “Any chance we can get the ILS 32?” Approach Control: “Well, there’s always a chance …” Me: “Well, capitalizing on that chance, we’d like to request the ILS 32.” Approach Control: […]

The Trouble With Trainers Interesting, Paul’s correlation of lack of trainer sales to the alleged “pilot shortage”. The lack of interest by producers (or former) of trainers just another indication to me how overblown the “pilot shortage” is. As far as Cessna building piston powered planes, I agree that I think they want to eventually […]

Thanks to the contents of the FAA’s new airman certification standards (ACS), which are replacing the practical test standards (PTS), most applicants for pilot certificates and ratings must now demonstrate that they can identify, assess and mitigate risk. Although the FAA and industry organizations have developed flight risk assessment tools (FRATs) to help pilots identify […]