Features

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 […]

There are only some 200,000 aircraft in the U.S.—there are more cars than that in a large town—so why any profit-oriented insurer would enter such a restricted market seems to defy logic. Yet, in the last decade, the number of aviation insurance underwriters has gone from the old, hard core of nine to 14, an […]

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 […]

Savvy pilots know how to get the most out of the resources at their command. They demonstrate this by having the airplane and its systems do as much of the effort as possible. In all phases of flight, their knowledge is brought to bear on each task to reduce the workload. This trait helps ensure […]

My wife, the captain, and I were flying to AirVenture 2017 in our C-152 in July. We were on an IFR flight plan out of Gainesville, GA (KGVL) and cruising at 5000 feet. We were talking to Atlanta Center. Centre: “Cessna 1234, cleared to FL230.” We just looked at each other and laughed. Fairly quickly, […]