Features

Controller: Cessna 123, traffic, opposition direction, five miles, at 4,000 feet Cessna 123: Looking for traffic, Cessna 123 Controller: Cessna 123, Love Field, six miles, 12 o’clock. Cessna 123: Cessna 123 looking for Love. Pause Cessna123: That didn’t come out right, did it. Controller: No but we hope you find Love, … and the airport. […]

The Icon A5 has been, for years, a press darling. Experienced journalists fresh off assignments flying multi-million dollar jets gushed over a pre-production light sport airplanes. Seriously? Icon said I could try to answer that question for myself, but only if I really flew the airplane and understood the customer experience. “Spend four days at […]

Which came first: the chicken or the Federal Egg Administration? Impossible to say. Physics teaches us that when Bernoulli found lift, his nemesis, Newton, said there must be an opposing reaction. So, when the Wright brothers flew, government pondered how to keep them from impacting all those other aeronauts. Little happened because of Newton’s Law […]

Face it: We love our GPS. Many of us fly with two of ’em installed, plus a portable for good measure. It’s arguably the most revolutionary advance in navigation, automation and IFR capabilities. Satellites now allow the most basic aircraft to navigate with amazing precision. However, there are caveats for modern RNAV pilots. We’ve become […]

While flying back to my home airport, KAVQ, I heard this exchange from two pilots entering the non-towered airport airspace: Cherokee: Cherokee 1234 entering left downwind for runway 12, full stop. A Grumman Tiger pilot was also entering left downwind making a similar call. Cherokee pilot: Grumman aircraft, we will swing wide since you are […]

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine 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 web site at www.ntsb.gov. Final […]

I’ve not found any published data on the subject, but after years or reading accident reports I’ve formed the opinion that pilots making takeoffs that will be followed by a flight on an IFR flight plan may unconsciously add a little more “I gotta go come hell or high water” attitude than their normal, Type […]

My daughter and I flew back from AirVenture on the last day of the show. While flying over Eastern Iowa and monitoring 122.80 we heard the following conversation that we assumed was between a couple of crop dusters: Pilot 1: “Hey XXX did you make it to Oshkosh this year?” Pilot 2: “Yeah, we got […]

About a year ago I began working for a company that does aerial survey (patrol) of pipelines. My job is to fly a Cessna 172 parallel to petroleum-carrying underground pipes while looking for what is euphemistically referred to as conflicts. Conflicts can be a wide variety of issues—leaks, damaged pipe above ground, equipment on top […]

I landed at KCMA, Camarillo, CA on a windy day and checked in with ground. Ground: “18 Sierra Romeo, taxi to the ramp via Foxtrot, caution, tumbleweed all quadrants, not my control” He wasn’t kidding either; huge tumbleweed balls were passing over the taxiways and runway heading downwind like a scene from an old Western […]