Features

Not-So-Gentle-T-Storms Informative, tragic, and with that simple photo of the storm front entirely predictable. With a dusty degree in Aeronautics and decades of 121 experience I had to Google the terms Sferics, graupel, and CAPE. I do admit while radar charts are easily intuitive, the divergence chart left me studying, and I would consider it […]

As we’ve watched aircraft and fuel prices skyrocket amid a “hard” insurance market, we’ve been wondering whether those variables are conspiring to push prospective pilots to work for a sport pilot rating rather than the private ticket and whether current pilots are downsizing to light sport aircraft and taking advantage of the more liberal sport […]

Flying into the Class D Purdue University Airport (home of the Purdue Boilermakers), I heard tower say, “N1234 enter right downwind for Runway 28.” A few minutes later the tower said, “N1234, I know you’re from Bloomington (home of Indiana Hoosiers), but it’s your other right.” Apparently the plane had turned left. Then someone else […]

On a warm summer afternoon, a two-ship flight consisting of a Beech A-36 Bonanza and a Piper PA-31 Navajo lifted off from Newport, Rhode Island. One made it through a looming storm; one didn’t. Short Trip The two airplanes made a gradual right turn to the southwest out over the grayish-blue waters of Rhode Island […]

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 […]

FAA Bill Stalled At Senate Committee I have not seen the bill, but I will opine that term simulator has different meanings to different people. Certainly there should be no concern about level D or even Level C simulators. At the opposite end, Aviation Training Devices, are also useful — in my experience of providing […]

Pilots interested in polishing pylons at the National Championship Air Races learn their trade at the Pylon Racing Seminar, or PRS as all the cool kids say. The official PRS school begins Monday and runs all next week, but many racers are already here at Reno-Stead where a formation clinic is in full swing. As the […]

Regent, a New England-based company formed a few years ago by a pair of MIT graduates and aeronautical-industry refugees, is challenging conventions involving airplanes and high-speed boats. Can a winged vehicle capable of leaving the surface of the water still be classed as a watercraft and not an airplane? And what does that difference mean […]

We were at 7,000 feet, in and out of clouds, destination a VFR-only airport. Thinking it might be hard to get below the clouds as we continued toward our destination, given the controllers’ MVA, and knowing there was a reasonable ceiling beneath the clouds now that we were past the mountains, I cancelled IFR and […]

Thinking back to my traditional aviation weather courses, I realized they didn’t address intense wind events where the agency of high wind all by itself wreaks its own special form of havoc. This year [2020] there were numerous high wind events — several haboobs in Arizona, a derecho in the Midwest, and wind-driven fires in […]