Features

Recently my wife and I flew to Harris Ranch (California) for breakfast. On the return flight, I dropped my wife off at Sierra Sky Park Airport before flying to Madera Municipal Airport, our home base. Madera Municipal is about 20 miles north of Sierra Sky Park. In winter we usually have ground fog in the […]

I’ve previously referred to scenes from Ernest K. Gann’s book “Fate Is The Hunter” in these pages. The combined autobiography and ground school traces his flying career from DC-2s over the eastern U.S., C-47s and C-87s over the North Atlantic during WWII, and DC-4s on the Honolulu/San Francisco run after the war. One of the […]

I’m Not A Robot! Many times I’ve shared a thermal with a vulture or even a Red-tailed hawk, but I have yet to share one with a Bald eagle. And the few times I’ve shared the sky with them, they offered little or no accommodation, so instead, I yielded. Are Bald eagles airborne snobs? I […]

Personal aviation opens up a world of interesting and beautiful places to visit and recreate, places that reward us for the time, training and skill to get there. Some places would be inaccessible except by horse, foot or airstrip, like the canyons, rivers and vistas of the Mountain West. Some places beckon because they offer […]

Editor’s Note: This feature was one of four in KITPLANES looking at the future of Experimental (homebuilt) aircraft. The rest of the series can be found here. For the general public, the idea of constructing your own airplane, with your own hands, in your own space, is borderline fantastical. To them, it seems crazy that […]

Soon after getting my PPL I took my parents for a ride in a C172. The flight from El Monte, CA, to Apple Valley was fairly uneventful. After crossing the San Gabriel mountains and starting the descent into Apple Valley, the wind over the desert picked up a little but not a big deal. We […]

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 […]

Slips: Forward Or Side, What’s The Difference And Why Care? As usual, great article…and for once a clear explanation that a slip is a slip…forward or side. I demonstrated a turning slip to a mission aviator trainee one day in our straight tail 172 with full Horton kit. Once established on base, I did a […]

It’s not surprising that Decathlons and Citabrias rank high on the list of fun airplanes to own, and it’s not uncommon for them to be second or third airplanes parked next to the family traveler. That also means these two-place aerobats can be easy to own. And if you have a burning desire to add […]

My next-door hangar neighbor, GlaStar builder and KITPLANES web manager, Omar Filipovic, had already cast his steely gaze upon the Titan IO-340 hanging from my GlaStar’s nose. A few days before “the event,” I had mechanic friend Will Steenrod pop over to provide another set of eyes. His expertise involves cars and motorcycles—as a factory-trained […]