Features

FAA To Expand Safety Management Systems Requirements Safety is a menacingly powerful word. While many safety aspects can be quantified with historical data, assessment qualitative and emotional aspects tend to vary with the situation or implementation. I operated with SMS requirements throughout my career that ranged from, “How you will mitigate this risk” to “Prove […]

Everything we do in life carries risk. An undesired outcome often is influenced by factors we can’t control—someone running a stop sign, for example, or a perfectly good engine deciding to fail. But many other risks of a specific activity can be anticipated. It’s why we wear a helmet when riding a bicycle, or earn […]

Holy Moses! I was doing over 30 mph … I was in a helicopter … I was on the ground … I was going sidewards … I couldn’t steer and sparks were flying everywhere … I could do nothing but ‘Keep calm and hang on’ … I was testing the emergency landing characteristics of a […]

Passing through New York’s airspace this summer, we heard the following: New York Approach: “Airliner 123 descend maintain 5000.” Airliner 123: “Descend 5000.” New York Approach two minutes later: “Airliner 123 descend maintain 5000, you appear to be climbing.” Airliner 123: “We are descending.” New York Approach: “Well you appear to be descending up, I […]

The Rutan Aircraft Flying Experience, a nonprofit organization based in Covington, Tennessee, is dedicated to preserving, flying and training pilots in Burt Rutan’s canard designs. Ryszard Zadow, the founder and prime mover behind RAFE, had a dream—he wanted to acquire a flying example of each Burt Rutan homebuilt design and fly them at places like the […]

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 […]

Why Aircraft Engines Should Be Hard To Start My first airplane had an A-75 Continental with no electrical system so you had to hand prop it. If you flooded it, per the manual, you needed to turn the prop backwards several times to “evacuate the cylinders” before trying again and sometimes that worked fine. Sometimes […]

The typical stock nosewheel shimmy dampener does a decent job of taming minor oscillations, but the nosewheel on older airplanes (and Cessna singles in particular) eventually needs some care. When all other components are healthy, that often means replacing the shimmy damper (this is occasionally called a dampener), and two popular aftermarket upgrades come from […]

At my home airport, apparently the controllers know my voice. But this day I was flying a friend’s airplane back to our home airport from maintenance, and the weather was characteristically benign with smooth air and clear skies with unlimited visibility. Me: “Tower, Twin Cessna 9287A, 15 south. Landing with Whiskey.” There was a long […]

Icing affects flight operations in many ways. Accordingly, we offer some thought-provoking reports from pilots who’ve been there. Little has been said about instrument malfunctions due to icing, and we discuss those in particular. Chilly Carburetors An instrument-rated Commercial pilot operating VFR experienced a sudden power interruption in his Cessna 150, followed by a surge […]