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When I trained for my private pilot certificate, 91.103 was drilled into my head. “Each pilot in command,” it says, “shall, before beginning a flight, become familiar with all available information concerning that flight.” The core of that is straight from the Boy Scouts: be prepared. Now, as an air traffic controller, it concerns me […]

When I was a baby flight instructor I, as with most instructors, rapidly learned a great deal about airplanes and the humans who fly them. Despite being a slow learner, some of those lessons stuck with me. Whenever I get into a discussion of the value of training for stalls, stall avoidance, spin avoidance and […]

I’ve noticed there is a bias, sometimes spoken aloud, that a pilot who made some sort of a mistake and had an accident was either not terribly bright, lacked basic skills or just plain didn’t have the magical “right stuff.” As an instrument instructor, I’ve certainly seen pilots with poor skills or who weren’t terribly […]

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine and is published twice a month. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause in the NTSB’s web site at www.ntsb.gov. Final […]

The idea of stuffing more air into an engine to increase its power output is anything but new. Mechanically driven superchargers have been compressing ambient air and feeding it to engines since at least 1885, with their exhaust gas-driven offspring, turbosuperchargers (often shortened to turbocharger or turbo), since 1905. The first turbos were installed in […]

Following hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the general aviation community distinguished itself by mobilizing to fly disaster-relief supplies and personnel into the affected areas and people and pets out. Being one of the fraction of one percent of our nation’s population that is a pilot, I watched news coverage of my sister and brother aviators who […]

The IFR environment is different from most any other human experience—voluntarily strapped into a seat, within a cocoon of aluminum and a maze of wires, flying miles above the Earth. Without any visual reference, this event can be both stimulating and stressful. Of the three phases of IFR flight; departure, en route and approach, we […]

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine and is published twice a month. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause in the NTSB’s web site at www.ntsb.gov. Final […]

At Reno 2013, Andy Chiavetta asked me if I would be available in the coming months to help him with a bunch of work he was hoping to finish. During the winter and spring of 2014, Andy would be delivering two Lancair Super Legacys—both clones of Darryl Greenamyer’s champion aircraft. These fire-breathing monsters would need […]

The Icon A5 has been, for years, a press darling. Experienced journalists fresh off assignments flying multi-million dollar jets gushed over a pre-production light sport airplanes. Seriously? Icon said I could try to answer that question for myself, but only if I really flew the airplane and understood the customer experience. “Spend four days at […]