FBOs

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

My co-pilot, Jerry, breezed into the cockpit at pushback time plus five and threw down his flight bag. “Sorry I’m so late — I somehow screwed up my schedule and didn’t even know I was supposed to fly today!”That sort of thing happens from time to time and there isn’t much you can do about […]

I wanted to make this month’s column another in the series of “courses” I’ve written over the last few years. The VFR season is upon us at Atlanta Center and the VFR traffic is climbing in direct relation to the mercury in the thermometer. As the summer progresses and the sky gets hazier, there will […]

To the delight of the multitudes, spring has arrived in the higher latitudes. Here in the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport, Old Hack showed up and growled proudly to the assemblage that he had survived another winter and only fired up the furnace seven times. He then made scurrilous comments about some of our […]

Computers have made aviation so much easier. A mere decade ago, flight engineers were trained to compute weight and balance figures on something called “a piece of paper.” These figures were then used in the operation of the aircraft.Then a major breakthrough happened and the airlines came up with a radio dispatch system that was […]