Features

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 […]

Several years ago while training for my instrument rating, I was flying with my instructor in dark-night rainy weather. My instructor was a big fan of realistic training and I was receiving a double dose of it on this evening. Our destination was KPIM (Pine Mountain, GA). We were planning to have dinner with my […]

You remember the bicycles hanging under the wing, right? You may not remember that the yellow-and-red high wing carrying those bikes was the Murphy Radical prototype, even though it was on our cover way back in the October 2017 issue of KITPLANES. But everyone seems to remember the bikes. Well, no bikes this time, but we’re taking another 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 […]

New Study Looks At Why Pilots Withhold Health Information I’ve been a physician for 36 years, a pilot 25 years, and an AME 22 years so I have something to bring to the conversation. I took the survey and I do not think it will bring valuable information, but perhaps a follow up will. I […]

Let’s see—we’ve got avgas in the tanks and air containing oxygen all around us. Somehow that air and avgas have to combine in a roughly 15 to 1 ratio—by weight—in the engine’s cylinders. Then they can do their suck, squeeze, bang and blow thing to make the prop go whirling around. Enter the humble carburetor, […]

Nashua Airport (KASH) was a madhouse. The pattern was stretched out, and filled with student airplanes. Folks were getting messages like, “You are number 5 for the field.” I was number 1 for departure and told that tower that I was ready when they could take me. The tower was apologetic. “I’ll get you out […]

Strong thunderstorms are one of the places aviation and fear often intersect. And for good reason: severe storms have led to countless disasters, perhaps the most famous one being the Delta L-1011 crash at DFW Airport in 1985. That tragedy brought far-reaching consequences to flight training programs and ATC equipment, and led to advances in […]

Airframe icing can be found year-round, depending on geography and altitude. In North America, it’s the season when pilots of personal airplanes, which generally don’t fly high enough to worry about ice most of the year, need to factor it into their planning and execution. Even if you’re flying something with a form of ice […]