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AVweb‘s Liz Moscrop is enjoying the sights and sounds of Farnborough this week, and she’s been kind enough to share a few photos from her trip. CLICK FOR LARGE IMAGES EACH IMAGE WILL OPEN IN A NEW WINDOW

It was a weekday evening and I’d just finished flying with a relatively new instrument student who was proving to be competent, determined to learn, and overall a genuine pleasure from an instructor’s point of view. I’d stopped into the Pilot’s Lounge at the virtual airport out of habit and ran into Old Hack, Sandy […]

This article originally appeared in IFR magazine, Mar. 2006. There is a chain of FBOs in the Midwest famous for warm cookies, parrots with rude vocabulary and impressive line ladies. The ramp full of airplanes indicates that pilots are attracted to, and distracted from, competing FBOs by these interesting things. Looking in the cockpit of […]

[AVweb’s reprint of A Pilot’s History began with Chapter 1.] In Florida, I had “the sun early in the morning and the moon at night” for a couple of days before the phone started to ring. You can ignore it for a few days, but soon someone will buzz your house in a plane or […]

The Demise of 100LL For at least 10 years, that I know of, the use and future availability of 100 octane low lead (100LL) aviation fuel (avgas) has been “under attack.” For example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been giving users a “pass” to continue using 100LL avgas with the caveat that the […]

This article originally appeared in Aviation Consumer magazine, Oct. 2007. The emerging Light Sport Aircraft market has ignited new interest in airplanes at the $100,000 price point and below. Most of these airplanes are composites, but buyers not interested in spending that much are looking hard at older LSA-compliant taildraggers — Cubs and Champs, for […]

This article originally appeared in IFR Refresher, Sept. 2007. Another pilot once told me he had been caught on top of cloud layers several times during his flying career but always escaped safely by simply calling ATC for an IFR clearance to get below the cloud decks and fly on VFR to his destinations. What […]

Of the many tasks that we have to perform as pilots, leaning the engine is one of the simplest. Leaning is vastly easier than shooting a circling approach in low IMC, picking the smoothest route through a cold front or deciding when to overhaul the engine. Yet no subject I know seems to trigger more […]

“We’ve been gone over 50 days now, and had just one weather-related delay,” says Thierry Pouille, organizer of Air Journey’s unique round- the-world GA tour, now in Asia. “It’s just chance, really!,” he admits, noting that several times weather would have been a factor if they had planned to fly just a day before or […]

It was Saturday afternoon at the local flight school and, as I tried to snooze in a lounge chair near the back of the room, I overheared a CFI begin his student’s Aviation as a Foreign Language training:”No,” he said, “it is pronounced ‘eh-luh-ron’ not ‘air-loin.’ “His student tried to repeat after him but still […]