Features

My friend had just completed his Pulsar XP kit, flew off the required hours, got it signed off, and asked me if we could fly to Oshkosh as a flight of two. We refueled in Jolliet, IL, and he took off first. The speedy Pulsar was quickly miles ahead of my Tripacer as we flew […]

It used to be that used Cessna 150s and 152s were budget buys, but like most piston singles in the current market, values for these durable two-placers—especially nicely upgraded models—have risen sharply. But once the big check has cleared, the right 150 or 152 shouldn’t break the operating budget thanks to its miserly fuel burn […]

When an instrument-rated pilot thinks of an approach, he or she likely pictures a so-called standard instrument approach procedure, or SIAP, the published approaches we all have come to know and “love.” A SIAP is described in FAR Part 97 and in published charting data available from the FAA and Jeppesen, for example. Standard approach […]

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 […]

Lightspeed Releases New Safety-Focused ANR Headset The built-in CO detector and hearing loss compensation are very interesting and I applaud them for adding these features to a headset. Yes, every aircraft has a CO detector but how many times do you look at that little yellow dot during a flight? It’s one of those things […]

Since the dawn of aviation, icing has emerged as one of the great hazards of flying. The 1994 American Eagle crash in Roselawn, Indiana, shows that this problem has dogged aviation well into the modern era and called the bluff of even trained and experienced pilots. Even in the 2000s, when numerical forecasting had become […]

In the early 1980s, when I was an admissions recruiter for East Coast Aero Technical School (now part of the National Aviation Academy network) at Hanscom Field in Bedford, Massachusetts, I was on my way to nearby Beverly Airport to represent ECAT at an Aviation Day event. On the seat next to me in the […]

Hail-damaged aircraft are what salvage deals are made of. If you’ve dealt with hail damage as I did with my Grumman after an isolated thunderstorm peppered it on a transient ramp in Wisconsin, you know it can be ugly. Shredded fabric, trashed windshields and gaping holes in the skin are an expensive reality.  But minor […]

Ensuring there is fuel aboard the airplane adequate for the planned flight is a basic, primary responsibility for any pilot. Unfortunately, the accident record tells us it’s one responsibility not all pilots fulfill. In our experience, fuel exhaustion, starvation or simple mismanagement accounts for a healthy proportion of engine-failure mishaps. This is true despite the […]

GAMI Unleaded Avgas Approved For GA Piston Fleet Go GAMI! (And thank you, FAA.) Absolutely the best possible news for GA. The only way that we get to keep flying in the U.S. There is *no* public support for airplanes flying around distributing lead from the skies. Peter M. Well then … if this can […]