Features

Like a lot of kids, I dreamed of flying. I used to ask for a flying car for Christmas every year. As an adult, that dream didn’t fade away. Now I’m a 23-year-old private pilot with my own airplane—a Van’s RV-6. After a lot of work, I made my dream a reality. Growing up, it didn’t […]

In less than 25 years, the “miracle” of GPS transformed how even the smallest and least expensive aircraft navigates. Thanks to the wide area augmentation system (WAAS) in the U.S. and similar technologies deployed in other countries, GPS is more accurate, more reliable and more repeatable than what came before. If you need proof, look […]

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 […]

Canadian Investigators Call For Improved Medical Screening For Pilots In response to your March 16 article (“Canadian Investigators Call For Improved Medical Screening For Pilots”), our takeaway is: swing and a miss. The Canadian Transportation Safety Board (equivalent of the U.S. NTSB) wended its way to a costly and cumbersome recommendation for a problem that […]

Beyond separating and sequencing aircraft, air traffic controllers are responsible for managing expectations. When I’m working traffic, I must ensure that what each pilot expects to be doing matches with what I expect him to be doing. Otherwise, it’s like trying to act out a play when all the actors are reading from different scripts. […]

We had just received our handoff from SoCal Departure to LA Center after departing Palm Springs International in our Praetor 500. We hadn’t even had a chance to check in when we heard this exchange: N1AB: “… requesting direct destination.” LA Center: “Who … who was that?” N1AB: “N1AB requesting direct to our final destination.” […]

Engines, exhaust systems, propellers, cabin vents and aging door and window seals are just a handful of sources that can make the typical aircraft cabin a miserable place to spend hours on end. It’s also a path to irreversible hearing damage. How do you know if your cabin is too noisy? Fly in a comparably […]

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 […]

Short Final: I’ll Call You Back Reminds me of a flight out of Anchorage to Palmer VFR. Palmer is on the other side of the USAF base and not far in a fast airplane. I had arrived IFR and this was my first time into ANC. It was a sunny summer day and there was […]

Each month, we chronicle recent accidents we hope are of interest to readers. A glance at a random month’s entries likely would reveal that a substantial portion of them involve total or partial failure of a piston single’s engine. Yes, there’s selection bias involved—we typically try to highlight the most educational accidents and incidents, and […]