Features

Advancing age has its benefits when it comes to flying—wisdom and experience are two, and perhaps greater financial security to allow us to indulge our aviation passion. But despite increasing longevity, much as we fancy achieving the ripe age of 969 years as Methuselah, we’re a long way from that (50 is the new 70). […]

I was approaching Gainesville, Florida the week after the Florida Gators were destroyed by the Nebraska Cornhuskers in a bowl game and I listened to the ATIS. The code was Gator. When I called the tower I thought I would be cute so I said I had Cornhusker. The tower controller got me real good […]

Old-School Navigation Technology is fine but has turned a lot of people into morons. I have fond memories of working out the solution to finding one’s position at sea using the stars and a sextant as you described. This was one of the 100 great elementary problems in Heinrich Dorrie’s great book. Also, it was […]

Most pilots have heard warnings about the timeliness (or lack thereof) of Nexrad radar. Better expressed as latency, the weather you see on your tablet, smartphone or multi-function display from providers like SXM or the FAA’s ADS-B could already be 15-20 minutes out of date. It can’t be said enough: What you see on your […]

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 […]

B737 MAX Crash Paul, From a 14,000 hour ATP rated pilot that has flown all B737 types (except the Max), my guess is that your guess is right. Crews these days rely so much on information that when a glitch happens their minds turn into jello and become passengers themselves. The same effect happened to […]

The Naval Air Station at Belle Chase regularly uses New Iberia, LA (KARA) as a refueling stop. I was flying my Piper PA‑32 into KARA to get fuel for myself and contacted the Tower. Tower: “Piper Three Five Eight One Whiskey, enter a left base for Runway 34. You are following two F‑18s on a […]

As he does from time to time, Dave, the proprietor of the flight school here at the virtual airport, sent out a mass email to his aircraft rental customers—students and certificated pilots—asking them to come to an evening gathering to socialize and discuss an issue of interest to all of us. The evening’s theme was […]

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 […]