Features

Suddenly Chatty Air Force Sending A Message Back in 1965, not long after President Johnson made the SR71 “public”, I was in high school in Fort Worth, Texas, home of Carswell AFB. The base was home for squadrons of B-52s and the supersonic B-58 “Hustlers”. We routinely saw both leaving in the morning for missions […]

At workweek’s end, winding down only to wind back up might seem antithetical to that hungering for a few days’ break. But for Mike Silvernagle, this routine makes perfect sense. The responsibilities of managing his construction business actually compel him to welcome the end of the typical workweek with yet another set of projects. The […]

Right after World War II, manufacturers of light aircraft assumed servicemen returning from overseas might want to learn to fly, and they were right. The sweet spot for this growing market was four seats, 150-HP and fixed tricycle landing gear. Cessna answered the call with the phenomenally successful Cessna 172. Piper’s response was the PA-28-140 […]

As I neared retirement, I flew every week from the Olive Branch, MS airport (KOLV) to my farm airstrip and soon-to-be new home in East Tennessee. KOLV is a small but busy airport under the Memphis International Class B Mode C veil and I always filed IFR. My weekly routine was to depart KOLV on […]

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 […]

Roll The Trucks I’ve declared emergency 3 times in my 20 years in the Pt. 135 business. Twice as PIC with smoke in cabin and once as SIC with flap failure. Never once did I get asked to file a report even though the trucks were rolled. Of course, my chief pilot handled reports to […]

Some time ago, I wrote about what happens during an emergency in the tower. But wait. There’s more. Of course, few pilots have declared an emergency, and even fewer have actually had an incident or accident. Crashing an airplane is on nobody’s bucket list (I hope), however the probability of surviving a plane crash varies […]

Pilots who have trained in fixed landing-gear airplanes like the Piper Warrior, or the Cessna 172, have long considered a Mooney M20J the logical step-up, as experience begins to gel and additional ratings appear in the logbook. Mooney M20Js typically achieve airspeeds north of 150 knots, and the 201 is known for its low fuel […]

My Class D airport seems to have little airspace it actually controls, having to talk to the overlying center for everything. The most common, of course, is to get an IFR release before any departure. Occasionally, our Tower controllers will try to anticipate to keep the traffic moving. On a recent trip, there was one […]

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 […]