Flight Safety

Anyone who has flown a Beechcraft will have come away impressed with the line’s quality and, especially, the handling qualities. All the way down to the lowly Musketeer, Beech just took pains to get the airplane’s handling qualities a cut above everything else, and that applies in spades to the Baron series. Even so, every […]

I’ve been doing some work on the Cub so I’ve been driving back and forth to the airport a couple of times a day. Inbound this morning, I was about to duck into a gas station and had second thoughts. The posted price was $2.43. Sure enough, when I drove home-five hours later-it was $2.38. […]

A widely cited story posted on the blog Quartz on Friday raises the question whether airline pilots who post aerial photos online are violating FAA rules against using “personal wireless devices” in the cockpit, but the FAA told AVweb picture-taking is OK with them — as long as pilots use the proper equipment. “A pilot […]

It was the wee hours of the morning, and the center’s frequency had been dead silent for quite a while. Finally, a pilot just had to check. Pilot:“Uh, Albuquerque – anybody home?” Controller:“Nope. We’re all at work.” Art Friedman

Oklahoma is expected to adopt emergency rules that will require wind farm prospectors to make the temporary towers they use to measure wind energy potential more visible to pilots. The so-called METs (meteorological evaluation towers) are usually a few inches shy of 200 feet tall, the height at which the FAA starts regulating tower marking. […]

Although it’s not the Hollywood blockbuster many predicted would result, a new film has been made that tries to shed light on the life of Colton Harris-Moore, the so-called Barefoot Bandit whose high-flying crime spree came to an end in a hail of bullets off the coast of the Bahamas in 2010. The Barefoot Bandit […]

One woman was killed and others were injured Wednesday when a French Air Force Alpha Jet training aircraft crashed into a home for the disabled in France. Both pilots ejected safely. The accident occurred about 5:30 p.m. local time in the town of Vouvray, near Tours in central France. The aircraft was on a night […]

Like a punch drunk fighter, I’ve grown accustomed to daily press stories about general aviation that either excoriate the industry-USA Today, for example-or cover the subject with such shallowness that it’s laughable. I think all of us have learned to roll with the blows and hope tomorrow brings better. On NBC News last night, it […]

Just because the vast majority of the airplanes most of us fly have their little wheel mounted on the nose instead of the tail doesn’t mean the nosewheel is immune to abuse. Nor does it mean we can ignore the nosewheel’s peculiarities, even if an airplane with one is much easier to handle on the […]

The flight data recorder from the Phenom that crashed inMarylandon Monday shows the airplane slowed to 88 knots on approach, with the flaps extended and landing gear down, the NTSB’s Robert Sumwalt said on Tuesday. At that point, the FDR shows the aircraft experienced “large excursions in pitch and in roll.” About two seconds later, […]