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What’s in a name? Or a label? When it comes toaircraft engines, a simple label — or, more properly, a logbook notation — cancarry an impressive cache that, in reality, may not mean what you think. A casein point is the value a buyer or owner puts on a “zero-time” engine asopposed to a freshly […]

Let me make this clear right up front. I hate thunderstorms. I loathe them. I despise them. I’d rather work 10 years of wintertime IFR- icing, bad rides and all – than work one more season of thunderstorms in Atlanta Center. I’d rather take a beating and get it over with. After a day of […]

No, I’m not telling you where to go. Or perhaps I am, you figure it out. “SIAP” is FAA-speak for “Standard Instrument Approach Procedure,” and frankly, they’re not very well understood. I don’t profess to understand them fully, myself. Yeah, you heard that right. I certainly don’t begin to understand all the “stuff” that makes […]

There are many things that you as an owner cando to extend the life of a prop, regardless of whether it’s made of wood on aCub or a fancy feathering rig on a Navajo. While inspections can be done by youas part of a normal preflight or extended routine inspection, you are limited onwhat you […]

What would you do if you thought that you had an electrical system failure and a vacuum system failure at the same time in a single-engine airplane? The chances of that happening are pretty slim, but the pilot of a Cessna T210 was convinced that he had both failures at the same time while flying […]

A while ago one of my instrument students and I flew nearly six hours in a day. Not surprisingly, his last landing was probably measurable on the Richter scale. Earning our eternal enmity, someone then made a crude, derogatory remark about the landing over the CTAF/Unicom frequency. Neither of us responded, but over the next […]

When we’re airplane shopping, not many of us buy new models so we’re stuckmaking our picks from an increasingly older fleet. You’d think that a30-year-old airframe flown a couple of hundred hours a year would be tapped out,but most aren’t. Yet many are corroded almost to the point of being unrepairable.Increasingly, in doing annuals and […]

John L. Baker was born July 8, 1928, in O’Neil, Neb. He started flying at 15 and went into the Air Force five years later. He flew fighters in Korea then taught fighter gunnery at Nellis, Pine Castle and Luke. After his military career, Baker went to law school in Omaha, and graduated with honors. […]

Click on any image to view a larger version.   Heli-Expo opened Thursday to an enthusiastic crowd.   The “fun” began earlier in the week…   …as the display aircraft arrived at the conventioncenter…   …and AVweb was there, for these behind-the-scenesshots.    But it was the convention floor, seminars, and displays…   …where folks gathered… […]

While the self-righteous denigrate those who mess up, we shout our barbaric yawp in praise of folly.