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During the century since the Wright Brothers first flew, the predominant perpetrator in aircraft accidents has shifted dramatically from machine to human. Today, human error is responsible for 90 percent of aircraft accidents and incidents. It’s not that people have become more careless, forgetful, inattentive or reckless. It’s that aircraft and aircraft components have become […]

The RTW pilots left Paris behind them and took off for Marrakech, in Morrocco, on the northwestern coast of Africa. The distance of about 1,100 nm meant only the PC-12 and the Cessna Conquest could fly nonstop. The TBM 700 and Cessna Mustang crews planned a stop in Gibraltar, near the southernmost tip of the […]

Taxi Instructions If the idea of relaying those instructions came from anyone less than the grey, FAA top end (AVwebFlash, May 20), it would have been either email or text direct to the cockpit to improve retention and verify correct information before the “send” key depression. Only the elderly still think voice is a great […]

Who knew that a nice afternoon movie during a Fort Lauderdale layover would lead me to pontificate yet again about aviation?The whole crew and I decided to take in an early after-lunch movie at the local cineplex. Since we had to take a vote on which movie to watch and since us two male pilots […]

This article originally appeared in Light Plane Maintenance, Apr. 2005. Attitudes about annual inspections vary widely. Some like to get right in there and do the owner-assist thing. (We hope most LPM readers fall into this category.) Others either won’t or can’t participate in their annual, and instead hand over the keys and maybe a […]

[AVweb’s reprint of A Pilot’s History began with Chapter 1.] Upon being released from the Air Force in the latter part of 1952, I went back to the non-scheduled airline where I had been working before the Air Force had called me back for the Korean fiasco. I was soon flying passenger runs in C-46s […]

This article originally appeared in IFR Refresher, July 2007. A turbocharged engine provides sea-level power to a higher altitude than a normally aspirated powerplant and is the main difference between the two. However, if a pilot is not totally familiar with the operation of turbocharged engines, it is entirely possible to misdiagnose a problem.Could that […]

Last week, we left our intrepid band of GA pilots in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, where they all had landed safely in VFR conditions, after a few changes of flight plans to accommodate the weather. The group spent the night there and by 5:30 the next morning they were up checking the weather in […]

Skip Flight Planning Mr. Stephans:I am writing in regards to your article Skip Flight Planning, (Flying the System, May 19). I agree with you! I am a retired Army aviator with 26 years of service. I was an Instrument Flight Examiner for most of those years as well as an Instructor Pilot.Planning a cross-country instrument […]

The Wright Brothers were successful because they combined two vital elements of airplane design: control and stability. Wilbur and Orville achieved control through a pioneering design that evolved into what’s used in almost all fixed-wing aircraft today — a system that makes use of the stability designed into the airplane. Controllability cannot exist without some […]