Flight Planning

Regardless of what you fly, how it’s equipped, and how old or new it is, you eventually will encounter inoperative instruments and/or equipment during a preflight inspection. It can be something known to the operator and the maintenance department, or it can be something new. Once the inoperative component is discovered, you have to make […]

The nasty mix of ice and snow that blanketed the Southeast on the weekend is expected to linger through Monday, cancelling thousands of flights and causing a ripple through the whole system. Charlotte Douglas International Airport appeared to be the hardest hit major airport. Although the temperature increased to just above freezing late Sunday, it […]

This week, AVweb‘s news roundup found stories about an FBO taking reservations for the Super Bowl, a new aviation search engine, a conservation organization looking for volunteers and a push by the U.K.’s Airfield Working Group to protect the country’s airfields. Hawthorne Global Aviation Services announced that it has started taking parking reservations for pilots […]

Who’s Afraid Of A Dead ASI? I could hear the pending screams as I was reading the article. I’m confident the self-appointed expert safety nazis are whipping themselves into a frenzy…I anticipate the storm is already bursting on the phone and email receptionists. (Well, maybe not on the phone. It’s easier to express offense and […]

A Florida man says he’ll try hang gliding again after his first tandem flight left him hanging on for dear life over the Swiss countryside. Chris Gursky’s pilot on the flight forgot to attach his harness to the aircraft and as they soared from the takeoff point Gursky grasped the control bar and the pilot’s […]

Old-School Navigation Technology is fine but has turned a lot of people into morons. I have fond memories of working out the solution to finding one’s position at sea using the stars and a sextant as you described. This was one of the 100 great elementary problems in Heinrich Dorrie’s great book. Also, it was […]

I was approaching Gainesville, Florida the week after the Florida Gators were destroyed by the Nebraska Cornhuskers in a bowl game and I listened to the ATIS. The code was Gator. When I called the tower I thought I would be cute so I said I had Cornhusker. The tower controller got me real good […]

When I was a callow lad, private pilot ground school was interactive. It was interactive not in the sense of the Pavlovian clicking of choices on a webpage, but of having a human instructor who actually talked and answered questions. Chalk was a thing then. One of the instructors must have been an old school […]