Flight Safety

While most Americans and Canadians are enjoying a three-day weekend in honor of Labor Day, the skies are full of pilots who are doing their jobs despite the holiday. According to federal statistics, more than 100,000U.S. workersearn their living in a cockpit, including all kinds of flying — charter, helicopters, cargo, corporate flight departments, rescue […]

Editor’s Note: A couple of weeks back, we ran a “Short Final” featuring a fictional genericized squawk code ending in 8 – and boy, did we get letters. Our favorite, though, was this “Short Final” follow-up recollection. Your recent “Short Final” reminded me of a funny story I got to participate in about two and […]

Letter of the Week:It’s the Instructors, Stupid I own a small flight school with three to five planes in central Massachusetts. It’s the kind where everyone is always greeted properly when they walk in, the kind the fosters a large pilot community, not just a pilot’s certificate. Otherwise, you’ll only watch them leave and their […]

The FAA is sticking to a previously announced scheduleand will end direct sales of paper charts on Oct. 1. After that date, all paper charts must be obtained from an authorized dealer. The agency stopped renewing chart subscriptions on July 1 although it will fulfill the subscriptions already on file until they run out.There are […]

Boeing Thursday released its 2013 Pilot and Technician Outlook that predicts the need for nearly 500,000 airline pilots by 2032, and the company says the number shows an increase over previous forecasts for nearly all regions. The company says the demand is driven by steady increases in airplane deliveries, most of which are single-aisle jets. […]

Heres my definition of a bad day: You overhauled your Barons IO-520s a couple of years ago using cylinders from ECI and now the FAA would like you to remove those jugs and replace them with something else. Round it off and call that about $25,000. Thats the basic gist of a proposed airworthiness directive […]

Approach, could you read back the arrival waypoints…we cant seem to find that arrival. The request got my attention because it came from the aircraft somewhere ahead of me in the soup of a thick overcast, headed to the same airport. The controller had just warned of a pending change to my arrival plans by […]

NASA announced Wednesday that it had teamed up with the U.S. Navy and the FAA to drop a CH-46E helicopter fuselage into the ground as part of an effort to improve the safety and performance of helicopters and construction techniques. A second test will take place next summer, subjecting to the same forces a CH-46E […]

If the world is full of opposites-and I think it is-the opposite of critical thought is group think or herd mentality. Group think is the tendency to go along with whatever new idea or trend comes along because, well, everyone else thinks its a good thing. Its just laziness by another name and were all […]

Rick Mathews, the president of AAP (Aviation Access Project) thinks that common sense is one of the key ingredients needed to reduce the 80 percent dropout rate in general aviation flight training. His goal is to reduce it to 25 percent or less while also doubling the pilot population to one million or more. Thats […]