Features

I was departing ATL 10 or so years ago. As you get to the end of the ramp, you contact north or south (as appropriate) ground control giving call sign, ramp (there are 9) and ATIS information. It was late evening after most of the flights had departed, a time when maintenance crews often tow […]

Back in the bad old days of VOR navigation you could find your position by tuning in two different VORs. Each radial from a VOR was a “line of position” from that VOR. Your position could be anywhere on that line. Where the two lines from two different VORs intersected was your location. For accuracy […]

Even before I started taking flying lessons, I was exposed to aviation. Without a formal frame of reference, I absorbed what little I could from other pilots’ stories, reading about flying in books and magazines like this one and, tragically, learning how some of them came to grief. That usually involved poor weather. It took […]

Last Boeing 747 Delivered My first flight in a 747 was in ’73 that started at Frankfurt while coming home from Germany on leave from my Army unit in Germany. The Pan Am bird had so few passengers that they allowed me to sleep laying out across seats in the center of the aircraft and […]

Who else noticed not one…or two…or three…but four unusual, slab-sided, negative-staggered cabin biplanes outside the International Aerobatic Club (IAC) headquarters at AirVenture 2021? The well-known comedian Steven Wright once punned, “You can’t have everything, where would you put it?” As pilots it seems we all want everything in an airplane, right? Ideally we would have […]

A few years ago, and before our jets were capable of long‑range navigation, I routinely flew one of our flights from St. Louis Lambert International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport. Late in the evening it was not uncommon to ask the Kansas City center for vectors to the Hector VOR (a common feeder fix […]

It’s not unheard of to think thunderstorms are only a product of summer weather. Certainly they are more common in warmer months, but wintertime “thundersnows” are common enough that I’ve seen a few. The point is that we can encounter thunderstorms any time of year, not just in the summertime. These days, it’s easy for […]

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 […]

Drone Collision Report Issued The problem with drones… you can’t see them in a hover from the air. From the ground you can see the dot in the sky. When a drone isn’t moving, it blends perfectly into the ground clutter. You will not be able to see or avoid it. There was a guy […]

Now that we’re staring at the weather picture from the depths of winter, perhaps you’ve been re-acquainted with how fronts make an impact on the weather. Fronts truly form one of the building blocks of meteorology. In the Air Force forecasting school I attended years ago, fronts were the very first topic that followed the […]