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Dubya had done us a favor this holiday season and officially made all of the Military Operations Areas “cold” during Thanksgiving weekend. What a guy; the MOAs are normally shutdown during holidays anyway, but a political point is a political point.Because of resting military flight crews and a generous (albeit disingenuous) president, we actually arrived […]

This article originally appeared in Aviation Safety, Jun. 2005. When the spring and summer flying season returns in a few months, many general aviation pilots will realize they haven’t flown much during the winter. As a result, they usually have lost some of the skills honed during the previous year’s flying season.Up to a point, […]

This article originally appeared in IFR Refresher, Jan. 2007. When a pilot contemplates an IFR flight, the focus will tend to shift towards the latter part of the trip. This is reasonable, as an approach is arguably the most challenging phase of any IFR flight.This focus on approaches, enforced during initial and recurrent training, does […]

[AVweb’s reprint of A Pilot’s History began with Chapter 1.] The news broadcasts and newsprint was not what I had seen and heard when covering the large expanse of the Pacific and its battlefields. The field commanders put out news slanted to benefit their positions. The civilian news reporters were obviously censored. Those that did […]

A380 (Not) Tail Strike Video The video of the A380 having a tail strike is undoubtedly part of the certification testing (POTW, Dec. 1). Since an over-rotation accident in Rome in the early days of jet transports, they must all now demonstrate their ability to lift off successfully if over-rotated on takeoff. Seems the A380 […]

My first flight instructor introduced me to the touch and go: power off, flare, flare, flare, “chirp” go the mains, hold the nose (“If the nose touches, it’s not a touch and go,” he said), flaps up, power up, carb heat in, adjust the trim in there somewhere, and up we go. The touch and […]

Ho, Ho, Ho! It’s that time of year again when aviators keep an extra lookout for unidentified flying objects traveling fast enough to circumnavigate the globe while landing a few billion times en route, and traffic controllers receive reports of old men in red suits whizzing around the skies who aren’t retired fast-jet display pilots.Too […]

What About the Instructor Shortage? We are hearing about the pilot shortage (AVwebFlash, Nov. 25), but what about the instructor shortage? When “old goats” like me get mass mailings from a school with large, contracted, flight-instruction needs with pay rates near $30/hour for primary instruction, there is a problem. And what about the mass postcards […]

Overhead, the massive, wide-chord blades begin rotating. Behind me the whine of the turbine builds as Walt Plentis goes through the start sequence and the 1800 horses of the Lycoming T53 collectively ask if we know what we’re doing, if we really want to wake them up to power a two-place aircraft. Walt assures them […]

UFOs Re: Pilots Want UFOs Investigated (AVwebFlash, Nov. 13)My father, Dr. Urner Liddel, was a nuclear physicist for the Office of Naval Research in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before I was born. At that time, he was part of a team using high-altitude balloons to measure cosmic radiation. Tracking those flights was not […]