Features

Is Accident Reporting Making Us All Crazy? I learned to fly before the turn of the century. In my first year as a private pilot I subscribed to the Aviation Safety newsletter, it arrived every month and was pre-punched with holes to place in a three ring binder. Two years later I traded my Aviation […]

Who has been working on this airplane? That was the question we would often ask in the shop when an airplane would come in for autopilot troubleshooting and we found control cable tensions so low you could strum a tune with them. Oftentimes it was to troubleshoot pitch and roll problems where the autopilot would […]

Several years ago, not long after earning my private pilot certificate, I departed the Burlington/Alamance Regional Airport, North Carolina, where I was based. My intent was to make a circuit around the outside of the Raleigh‑Durham Class C airspace and return to Burlington to land. Unsure how to ask for flight following for such a […]

The Terminal Aerodrome Forecast, TAF, is a staple of aviation weather, known to almost every pilot. During my own Air Force career, I composed hundreds of TAFs for pilots not too different from you. In this article we’ll take an inside look at this tool in a more readable format than you’re probably used to. […]

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 […]

Low-Viz Takeoffs Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, though anyone suggesting a zero-zero makes it easy to determine whose aviation judgement I would trust my loved ones with. The crews wearing the big boy pants have thoroughly engineered/tested avionics/installations, repetitively trained/evaluated proficient multi-pilot crews, redundant equipment, rigorous SOPs and supporting field infrastructure. Even […]

For those with the skill and budget, a Cessna 425 Conquest I may still be one of the least expensive ways to get into the world of turboprop twins. Its direct competitors might be the Piper Cheyenne I, a Beech King Air 90 and even some turboprop singles. And for those with a goal of eventually […]

Airplanes are designed for particular missions. Some are simple ultralights designed to lift you off the ground for a few minutes in the golden hour of evening light. Some are fast performance cruisers intended to whisk you and your baggage across the country in short periods of time. Others are designed to ring out your […]

One day I landed at Snohomish County Airport (Paine Field), Washington, after doing some practice approaches in nice actual benign IMC. After I had landed, tower kept me on their frequency as I taxied to the hangar. Just before shutting down, they asked: “N30322, when did you break out?” To which I replied, “I don’t […]

Randall Funston of Van Bortel Aircraft Inc. likes to tell the story of how the company got its start. It’s one of those scrappy, bootstrap tales that seems to abound in aviation: “Howard Van Bortel started the world’s largest Cessna dealership in 1985 on a card table in his sister’s living room with $1,000 in […]