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Regional Airline Hiring A comment on regional hiring (Question of the Week, Jun. 13): You get what you pay for.Over the past 20 years the system has been its own worst enemy. Why would a person invest $50,000 to $75,000 or more to get all the ratings and experience it takes, plus the cost of […]

Flight instruction is considered to be one of the safest categories of general aviation. AOPA Air Safety Foundation’s 2006 Nall Report (3 MB Adobe PDF file) calls flight instruction “… relatively safe … result[ing] in just 13.2 percent of all [NTSB-reported] accidents and only 6.5 percent of fatal accidents.” AOPA attributes this to “… the […]

From the country where it’s considered polite to hurl your dinner plate at the wall once you’re done dining comes one of IAOPA’s most dedicated and passionate leaders. Yiouli Kalafati is a true poster-girl for GA. As president of AOPA-Hellas, she has been a driving force behind its successful bid to host next year’s biannual […]

The atmosphere in the Pilot’s Lounge at the virtual airport has been decidedly unpleasant over the last several weeks. About half of the pilots here rely on telephone briefings with Flight Service to get their aviation weather information and file flight plans. As any pilot in the U.S. is now aware, the Lockheed-Martin takeover of […]

Flight Service Stations I must be the only person in the country not affected by the FSS problems (AVWebFlash, Jun. 13). I’ve been using DUATS since its inception because it gave me the one thing FSS never could seem to provide: just the facts, M’am, just the facts. All I ever wanted was the weather […]

Flight Service Stations I have been a pilot weather briefer for almost 20 years — four years in Missoula, Mont., and the last 15 here in McMinnville, Oreg. I take pride in the experience and knowledge-base I have gained over the span and in the fact that I can convey to pilots what they need […]

This article originally appeared in Aviation Safety, Apr. 2005. The first few hundred hours of any pilot’s flying career are the ones involving the greatest accumulation of experience and judgment. In some ways, it’s a miracle any of us survive this period; in other ways, these first few hours of flying time are both necessary […]

By now, I suspect most AVweb readers know that I am a strong advocate of overhauling piston aircraft engines “on condition” rather than “on time.” I have always considered it both irrational and uneconomical to tear down an otherwise healthy engine just because it has attained some arbitrary number of hours or years in service.In […]

This article originally appeared in IFR magazine, Feb. 2005. You are IFR and solidly in the clag; the terminal area is busy and Departure Control sounds like a tobacco auctioneer. You are flying single pilot, trying to comply with the eparture clearance but beginning to have a hard time keeping up with the airplane. Your […]

This article originally appeared in IFR Refresher, Apr. 2006. What any pilot does not need at the end of a long day is low ceilings and poor visibility with fog. Yet, that is what a Beech Baron pilot faced in the early hours of an October morning in 2001 when he needed to reposition his […]