Features

Buying Backcountry: Focus On Your Needs Rick, American Champion designed the airfoil tail, 11% larger, out of necessity when the “Scout-Water Bomber” was developed in 2010. The bomber version carried 1,000 pounds of water in the back seat area. Equivalent to 5.9 FAA standard folks in the back seat! Let that sink in! The flat […]

Dialing in the altimeter setting is perhaps one of the most universal, timeless rituals of aviation, spanning decades, continents, and cultures, and tying all pilots to one another. This underscores the importance of atmospheric pressure and its effect on flight safety. But how much do you know about where those numbers come from? In this […]

As the World War II story goes … at an advance American fighter base during the North African offensive, mechanics fixed up a left-behind medium bomber, which took on the role of squadron “hack,” including one regular mission that was never recorded on the official logs. Apparently, there was no shortage of GI beer, but […]

Want to start a fight at a gathering of pilots? Just innocently ask, “Hey, what’s the best backcountry airplane?” Go hide. Then come back in 10 minutes and watch the chairs flying.  Backcountry flying and the airplanes designed for it have powerful allure that, combined with the adrenaline factor of STOL operations, often causes any […]

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 […]

What induces a young CFII to invest the massive amounts of energy, time and investment dollars needed to go up against online ground school titans like the Kings, Gleim or Sporty’s? Have a chat with Maryland-based flight instructor Dan George and discover a man who takes flight instruction to a higher level. He comes at […]

Team Tackles Unexplained Aerial Phenomena It’s about time. The other countries particularly France have led the way to open, true scientific approach to this subject. There is an excellent book by an author named Keane. If you look at this from the scientific method: the only conclusions thus far are that there are over 700 […]

It was in the news: Noted actor and aviation proponent Harrison Ford, while arriving at an airport on the west coast, reportedly landed on a taxiway, not the assigned runway. Oops! Dissecting that event is not this article’s purpose. But it did get me to wonder: How often does this happen? Why does it happen? […]

Several years ago, I offered to take my young adult son and two of his friends in my Cirrus and drop them off at the beach. After the required defueling (Ugh), we took off for the 30‑minute flight. My son let one of his friends, Brian, sit in the front with me so he could […]

Among the many effects of the supply chain problems in the summer of 2022, aviation discovered that it was having a difficult time functioning without a simple commodity—the oil filter. Lycoming and Continental engines everywhere needed spin-on, disposable oil filters to keep flying, and the supply was extremely limited. KITPLANES research found that Champion had […]