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It is a very rare occasion when I attend an Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) meeting. Usually, they are held at some motel meeting room hundreds of miles from my home, and it is also usually during a very nice day that could be better spent outside playing tennis.The turmoil over potential pay cuts of […]

ATC Retirements How is it that President Reagan could fire 12,000 air traffic controllers, and replace them overnight (NewsWire, June 16) … and today we can not find 7,000 ATC replacements over the course of many years?John Van Baren AVweb Replies Well, effects of the PATCO strike are still being felt. Initially, supervisors and military […]

About that VFR “course” I wanted to write last month: Would you like to guess why I wanted to write it? That’s right — because I’ve been working a sector full of them lately.I’ve aimed my previous columns about VFRs (mostly) at the low time pilots. This time, I want to talk to the rest […]

Click for Full-Size Images Each high-res imagewill open in a new window. Be sure to check out ourgallery of pre-launch photos And that’s just the media parking lot … Pre-dawn Monday.The world awaits. The beginning of a very new day. Libyan Mig killer and manager of China Lake’srestricted airspace, Rear Admiral Dave Venlet (right), chats […]

Click for Full-Size Images Each high-res imagewill open in a new window. Be sure to check out ourgallery of launch day photos Scaled composites – not your average workplace Very Light Jets – a good (if old) idea A flower in the desert, making history There’s more than one reason NASA would have run way […]

Panic in DC I just loved the recent incident with the Governor of Kentucky and the DC ADIZ (NewsWire, June 14). We need a few more like this so senior government officials will see the folly of this ADIZ nonsense.I understand that the pilots of that plane had notified ATC of the transponder malfunction, flew […]

A friend of mine called the other night. She’s a designated pilot examiner and we’ve known each other for almost 30 years. She had the usual list of complaints about the inadequacies of the current bunch of applicants she had examined. Very often, my friend arrives at the airport to administer a practical test only […]

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A few of my very nice readers have commented that I’ve missed a column or two recently. Thanks for noticing!With all the wonderful things going on in my life, I’ve had a lot of trouble of making my AVweb deadlines. Most of my columns take a fair amount of time to write, and the load […]

I was in the pilot’s lounge, here at the virtual airport, doing my shallow breathing exercises, when I found myself eavesdropping on some training one of the instructors was giving to a primary student. The instructor was going on and on about the importance of the preflight inspection as well as all of the possible […]