Features

So here I am. A 23-year-old with my own airplane. I’ve made the investment but don’t (yet) know how to fly it or fix it. I knew that N2165U, my Van’s RV-6, was going to need a lot of love, and I wanted to start immediately so I could fly it as soon as possible. As […]

Returning to Palo Alto airport from the East on a short flight through the busy Bay Area airspace, I was admiring Mount Diablo at 4500 feet when NORCAL instructed, “Skylane XYZ hold your current position.” I was extremely tempted to respond “NORCAL, Skylane XYZ commencing ‘Pugachev’s cobra’ maneuver,” but said instead “Skylane XYZ right 360s.” […]

When you present yourself to a designated pilot examiner (DPE) or an FAA employee for a checkride to add a new certificate or rating, both you and the aircraft are subject to closer inspection than you may be accustomed. Pilots aren’t expected to know the dry torque specification for an engine’s cylinder studs, but they […]

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 […]

The Biggest Aerospace Story Ever (Yawn) Incredible visual phenomena, classified military operations, or alien beings? I have to go with the first two. In addition to having over 25,000 hrs flight time, I probably have an equal amount of time working outdoors in remote regions around the planet, much of it at night. Many of […]

Pilots have to keep up with quite a bit of knowledge. There are regulations, procedures, chart symbology, various engineering disciplines, and many others. For some pilots, business skills have to be added to the mix. And on top of this, you’re expected to have a working understanding of meteorology. Sometimes your knowledge gets a bit […]

I recently had a long flight from Somerset, New Jersey, to Houston Southwest Texas. I don’t remember which approach controller it was, but when I got handed off to him and I checked in, he acknowledged, “Malibu 7MX, XYZ approach, altimeter James Bond.” I wasn’t sure what I heard so I said, “Say again?” My […]

Speed costs money. That’s why few airplanes coming out of the factory were optimized for speed—it costs staggering sums of money to certificate a production airplane and at some point, the engineers and bean counters threw up their hands and shouted, “That’s enough!”   While the cruel realities of squared functions when it comes to speed […]

Outside of large training organizations or fleet operations, there is little standardization of equipment, systems or procedures within general aviation. Toss in a few years among different owners and identical airplanes that rolled off an assembly line together 10 or 20 years earlier will vary wildly in their equipment, maintenance history and wear and tear. […]

Who You Gonna Call? Good article on SAR coordination. It’s a complicated system with many players but letting everyone know exactly where you are can have a dramatic effect on search and rescue time. I have an ARTEX ME406 in my Maule and carry an ACR ResQLink 400 PLB and Garmin InReach Explorer SE in […]