Flight Training

While electric aircraft have gotten plenty of gee-whiz press coverage, they lack one thing: credible production airplanes. At Redbird’s Migration training conference this week, Aero Electric Aircraft Corp.’s George Bye pledged to change that by showing up at next year’s event with a prototype of the Sun Flyer, a two-place electric that may become the […]

With a year and 1,300 hours of operation behind them, Redbird says its converted diesel Skyhawks have delivered bulletproof maintenance reliability and significant savings in direct operating costs. At a short briefing during the company’s fourth annual training conference in San Marcos, Texas, Redbird’s Darren Bien told a small group that thus far, customer response […]

As if everything in aviation isn’t hard enough to get done, it’s grimly amusing how we’re able to make it harder yet. Just ask anyone trying to get a simple cert project on the FAA’s agenda, much less getting it approved. Even the stuff that should be simple and quick, isn’t. That came to mind […]

Redbird Simulations opens its fourth annual Migration training conference in San Marcos, Texas, today, with two days of forums and industry discussions about training issues critical to the aviation industry. On the agenda will be a brief review of Redbird’s experience in operating its Redhawk diesel Skyhawk conversion and a progress report on the company’s […]

At Redbird Simulations’ fourth training conference in San Marcos, Texas, AVweb got a look at the latest version of the company’s TRACE technology, which will enable students to teach themselves many of the basic maneuvers necessary to learn to fly. view on YouTube

Thursday’s tragic mid-air between a Cirrus SR22 and an R44 helicopter illuminated a watershed of sorts. With November near upon us, the accident marked the largest number of ballistic parachute deployments for Cirrus aircraft in a calendar year, but also the lowest rolling 12-month average of fatal accidents in the models’ history. If the two […]

A new partnership between Cirrus and OpenAirplane is designed to make it easier for more pilots to get access to airplanes throughout the country. Pilots who go through Cirrus factory training will have the option of obtaining rental credentials for the same model of Cirrus without an additional checkout at flight schools and FBOs that […]

CAE has opened a new 60,000-square-foot business aviation training facility, CAE Dallas East, just east of the Dallas Forth Worth Airport, the company announced Tuesday at the NBAA convention in Orlando. The company has also added programs at its existing Dallas facility. The combined Dallas space now totals 486,000 square feet, with 40 simulators, 114 […]

Based on my data sources, since August 1, 2014, we have not administered a single ATP knowledge test that would allow a pilot to then go on to take the ATP multi-engine practical test and become ATP qualified for service in an airline. Yup. None. For two whole months and I expect this trend to […]

Mark Twain once said, “If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” That’s also true of flying a Cat I ILS to minimums. No amount of training, except maybe in the best simulators, prepares you for what it’s like to reach DA and see … very […]