Flight Safety

Mother Nature hasn’t been particularly kind to general aviation airplanes this year. Not every aircraft owner was able to get away from the winds and flooding of Hurricane Matthew and a lively tornado season did its share of recycling aircraft aluminum into beer cans. The word on the street is that, in most cases, the […]

A Cessna Citation carrying four people, including former Alberta premier Jim Prentice, crashed Thursday night in British Columbia. Canada’s Transportation Safety Board said the jet dropped off radar after departing Kelowna bound for Springbank, Alberta, in the Calgary area, according to a CBC report. Rescue crews received a report of a crash about 9:40 p.m. […]

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 […]

Investigators probing a fatal Piper Seneca crash in East Hartford, Connecticut, Tuesday afternoon suspect it was a suicide act by the student pilot who was killed. News outlets reported the twin aircraft came from a flight school at Hartford’s Brainard airport and was on approach to the field when it smashed into a utility pole […]

The Collings Foundation’s bombers were giving rides while I was getting ready to depart the airport at Ramona, CA early this summer. When I called for takeoff, I was told to hold short while a B-17 landed. After that beautiful plane cleared the runway, the follow exchange happened: RNM: Cessna, cleared for takeoff, caution wake […]

American skydiving showman Miles Daisher makes his living doing extreme sports but even he’ll admit a recent jump was out of the ordinary. Daisher and other members of his Miles Above television series were doing a wingsuit jump for the cameras when the boot on the suit snagged around the gear leg step of the […]

For the past 10 days, I’ve been flogging the Cub around testing some new action cameras from Garmin and GoPro. Look for the video on that next week. While the Cub is fun to fly, it’s not like you’re going to take one on a trip, unless you’ve got calendar-scale time to burn and an […]

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

There has been one light quietly continuing to burn despite the dark news of declining general aviation activity—that’s sport parachuting, you know, skydiving. While the number of pilots has dropped, airports are closing and new aircraft sales just struggle along, skydiving activity has been consistently growing. Canny airport managers looking at red ink in their […]