Flight Training

What makes training good? What makes it stick so that when you really need it, you can make the right decision and execute accordingly? Anyone who has earned a flight instructor certificate will remember the Six Laws of Learning as elucidated in the FAA’s dreary Aviation Instructor’s Handbook. My friend John Deakin once told me […]

Compared to landing, taking off is relatively simple. Our instructor lets us make the first takeoff of our very first flying lesson—or at least makes us think we made the takeoff. If everything goes right, it’s easy. But how do you know everything is going right? And how do you know what to do in […]

Back by popular demand is AVweb’s penetrating review of why pilots fly patterns that are just insanely, infuriatingly too large. Extra stripes available by request. view on YouTube

Further apropos of our slow flight yammering of last week, I put the skill to use on Thursday. After 119 days or so of not flying as I recover from an injury, I took the Cub up to knock off the rust. I flew down to a nice little county grass strip south of Venice […]

You have to hand it to the FAA. This is a government agency that’s gifted in its ability to tweak the rules in a way that makes we, the regulated, twist, dance, squirm and shimmy in the most creative ways. The latest example came last week when the FAA revised its standards for teaching that […]

The FAA has issued a Safety Alert reminding instructors, students and other general aviation pilots that the advised procedure for practicing slow-flight maneuvers has changed. The FAA’s new advice intends to correct “inconsistencies” in the previous standard for maneuvering during slow flight, as outlined in the Airplane Flying Handbook published in 2004, and the latest […]

I am an instructor in Germany and was with a student flying to his first towered airport. The aircraft has no GPS installed and visibility was around 4-5 km in mist. We were given the entry into the control zone via VFR reporting point “November.” Tower (in a kind, investigative voice): “D-HR you are a […]

A group of Canadian pilots will bring history to life by flying replica First World War fighters over a ceremony commemorating the Battle of Vimy Ridge next April. view on YouTube

 The Wall Street Journal is reporting the FAA is considering reducing the number of hours military pilots must have before they can be airline first officers. An industry-labor panel has recommended that military pilots with as little as 500 hours be allowed to slide directly into the right seat of airliners. The current minimum […]

Every primary student who’s at least been ready to solo has experienced a few stalls and recoveries. If they’re lucky, they also are introduced to different kinds of stalls, and how the ways we enter them can help determine their characteristics. Along the way, we learn ways to recover from them. We learn these maneuvers […]