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This Week’s Question | Last Week’s Results PREVIOUS RESULTS *** Last week, we received a great conversation-starter e-mail from an AVweb reader about why people fly.  Did they have a windfall that made buying a plane possible?  Did they learn to fly in the military?  Or did they learn to love the air from flying […]

Prop strikes come in all kinds of flavors. Some involve obvious sudden stoppages of the engine (for example, a gear-up landing). In others, the engine keeps running, perhaps with some short-term loss of RPM as the prop tips curl back. Still others occur when the engine is not running (such as when a car backs […]

Circling Approaches Having read Brian Johnson’s article regarding the accident of the Bonanza circling at Chester, Conn., (Probable Cause, Aug. 21), I’m reminded how often I see pilots, especially high-time pilots, attempt the same maneuver without an ATC clearance to do so. The circle-to-land must be part of the approach clearance from the Approach Controller. […]

I was in the pattern at KSRQ shooting a bunch of touch and goes in a Piper Cherokee. The tower called with my next landing clearance. The conversation went something like this… Tower: Warrior 12345, cleared touch and go, runway 22. Me: Cherokee 12345, cleared touch and go, runway 22. Tower: Cessna 12345, roger. Winds […]

Summer is always a cornucopia of weather delays, hot cockpits and long duty periods. If you add in the occasional terrorist scare, you can spend quite a bit of time at the airport or in the airplane.You usually smell and feel pretty good while doing this, but with yesterday’s confiscation of my crew’s deodorant, toothpaste […]

CEO of the Cockpit #61: There’s No Trying to Reason With the Terrorist Season – (Aug. 27, 2006)Do you want to see the captain of your airline flight walk through security in stocking feet with his “air marshal” government-approved gun in a clear plastic bag? AVweb’s CEO of the Cockpit just wants to keep his […]

This Week’s Question | Last Week’s Results PREVIOUS RESULTS *** Last week, we asked how you feel about being stuck with 100LL as your primary avgas. Most of those who responded weren’t very concerned.  100LL will be around as long as I am, 27% of you said – even if I fly for another 35 […]

NATCA “Contract” Please don’t insult the men and women of the FAA air traffic controller workforce by saying we have a new “contract.” A contract is negotiated and agreed upon between parties. These are work rules that are being forced on us by the FAA. The FAA is wasting millions of dollars to send supervisors […]

This article originally appeared in IFR Refresher, March 2005. The ceiling was only 300 feet AGL, which was more than 100 feet below the published minimums for the approach. Visibility was marginal at 2-1/2 miles in mist, but it was a dark winter night and the temperature and dew point had already converged at zero […]

“I was sitting on the ramp just about to fly out of Lubbock, TX, yesterday when hopping along came the biggest jackrabbit I ever saw. I thought I would advise ground control about it so they could spare some aircraft from making contact with it on the runway…” Me: Lubbock ground, um, there’s a big […]