Features

Why Your Performance Charts Are Wrong In my youth I once took off on a golf-lawn quality but slightly wet runway that was sufficient by book figures, only to make it over the fence and adjacent road with shaking knees and at barely enough height not to touch crossing cars. Based on that experience the […]

There’s a performance chart for every basic phase of flight. Pilots use them to determine how fast they can fly, for how long and how much runway they’ll use doing it, among other things. The tables, graphs and charts in the performance section of your typical personal airplane’s flight manual or operating handbook purport to […]

When traffic was diminished initially in the pandemic, it sure seemed different flying into New York airspace, with far fewer airplanes and fewer grumpy controllers. In fact, some were actually courteous with terms like “thank you” and such finding their way into transmissions. And then there was this exchange between New York Approach and another […]

Walking the pits at Reno, you pass through a few rows of RV’s, Lancairs, and Glasairs, then a couple of aisles of T-6’s. Next, you come to the big guys—Sea Furies, big Grummans, a Corsair, and finally a couple of rows of Mustangs. This year, when you hit the east end of the Mustangs, you […]

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 […]

Diamond Rollover: Freak Accident Or A Design Flaw? Quite many years ago, I landed at a S. Fla airport with a thunderstorm rapidly approaching and very near the airport. I landed just fine and was cleared to taxi to the ramp that was approximately a mile away. I got about 1/3 of that distance when […]

Utility. It’s all about utility.  That’s why we buy any airplane when we don’t do it purely for fun. We want to go places, we want to go fast and we want to go when we want to go.  We buy speed. We work our whatsits off to get an instrument rating and pay tens […]

As a CFI, I recently had the opportunity to attend a Mooney Pilot Proficiency Program at KSMX, Santa Maria airport, up the coast from Los Angeles. We were told that we could do approaches—but no landings or touch and goes—at nearby Vandenberg Space Force Base (KVBG). We thought this would be a great opportunity. Once […]

You might have heard the old adage, “The flight cannot be cleared for departure until the gross weight of the paperwork exceeds that of the aircraft.” While cynical, this reference to all the required processes, rules, and regulations makes a good point. Regulations and procedures for pilots largely mirror those of ATC, but these might […]

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 […]