Features

I recall a chilly morning at the Reno-Stead airport when I realized I no longer felt like a total outsider. It was 2017, the first year I towed Jeff LaVelle’s trailer full of tools, hardware and a spare Hartzell propeller to the National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nevada. He raced his Glasair III and I stood alongside him […]

One beautiful day in Atlanta Center, Smiley, a well‑known character at the TRACON, was the final approach controller and was assigning everyone 180 KIAS to the marker. Atlanta Center: “Corporate 123 say speed.” Corporate 123: “160 … Ahh I mean 180.” Atlanta Center: “Corporate 123 maintain 200 knots. Your 180 is 20 knots slower than […]

Just as with any other complex endeavor that’s developed over time, aviation has many myths. That’s especially true when it comes to FAA regulations—the FARs. To be fair, there are a lot of regulations, and many of them are written for attorneys, not pilots. Especially for newer pilots or those who fly different aircraft in […]

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 […]

Short Final: Soaring Not far from the USAF Academy was Black Forest Gliderport (now closed). One of my fondest aviation memories is a wave-soaring flight over Pikes Peak in the early ’80’s. Dressed in cold-weather gear and breathing from a diluter-demand oxygen mask, we released at 7,500 MSL and then soared the wave to 21,000 […]

Every single emergency procedure you can imagine should follow the basic outline of “aviate, navigate, communicate” on the pilot’s side of things, but what does ATC do? It’s actually kind of backwards. We communicate with you first to find out what you might need, then we navigate other conflicting airplanes out of your way so […]

Flooded airports are nothing new but volunteers are being sought to fix up a runway in a seemingly unlikely place to see flooding. Saline Valley Warm Springs Airfield, better known as the Chicken Strip, in California’s Death Valley National Park has been closed after flooding cut deep ruts in the gravel runway. In a three-hour […]

When it comes to piston singles, it’s not often that the words classic and speedster are used in the same sentence, but it’s true of the Meyers 200 series. A design dating back to 1953, the Meyers won speed records as bragging rights. There are plenty of reasons why owners love their Meyers 200s—speed being […]

My first piloting experience was as an Air Force Academy cadet, soaring at the Academy’s airfield (6576 feet MSL). This great summer program offered a checkout and 25 hours in Schweizer two‑ and single‑seat gliders. There were more winch tows than tow ships, so the opportunities to venture far for lift were limited. My big […]

The images above show the busy view outside of Garmin’s King Air somewhere around Memphis cruising northwest-bound, and how it looks on the GWX 70 Doppler weather radar. Plan your path through—we’ll come back to it later. ADS-B may pause an active radar upgrade decision for anything but twins and turbines, but radar is far […]