Flight Safety

Nominate an FBO |Rules |Tips |Questions |Winning FBOs AVweb‘s “FBO of the Week” ribbon goes to Pontiac, Michigan’s Oakland Air (KTPK), an FBO that recently went the extra mile to make an unplanned trip a little easier for AVweb reader Tom Ahonen. Tom shared the story with us: I received one of those phone calls […]

Nominate an FBO |Rules |Tips |Questions |Winning FBOs AVweb‘s “FBO of the Week” ribbon goes to TAC Air at GMU in Greenville, South Carolina. AVweb reader John Hey hadn’t stopped at GMU for six months, but he tells us “they still remembered me”: Great, cheerful, and competent service – even though I had just saved […]

If a nonpilot asks you “How do you take off?” how would you answer? Line up with the runway, add power, accelerate to liftoff speed, raise the nose and go. But is it really as simple as that? Every year airplanes fail to get off wet or muddy runways, or to clear obstacles past the […]

This article originally appeared in IFR magazine, Mar. 2006. There is a chain of FBOs in the Midwest famous for warm cookies, parrots with rude vocabulary and impressive line ladies. The ramp full of airplanes indicates that pilots are attracted to, and distracted from, competing FBOs by these interesting things. Looking in the cockpit of […]

It was a weekday evening and I’d just finished flying with a relatively new instrument student who was proving to be competent, determined to learn, and overall a genuine pleasure from an instructor’s point of view. I’d stopped into the Pilot’s Lounge at the virtual airport out of habit and ran into Old Hack, Sandy […]

Nominate an FBO |Rules |Tips |Questions |Winning FBOs AVweb‘s “FBO of the Week” ribbon goes to St. Petersburg Flying Service at KSPG in St. Petersburg, Florida. AVweb reader Shaina Lotu writes: I’ve never met a more user-friendly FBO. This FBO has an extremely competitive fuel price for how much service they offer … [and] they […]

This article originally appeared in IFR Refresher, Sept. 2007. Another pilot once told me he had been caught on top of cloud layers several times during his flying career but always escaped safely by simply calling ATC for an IFR clearance to get below the cloud decks and fly on VFR to his destinations. What […]

Nominate an FBO |Rules |Tips |Questions |Winning FBOs AVweb‘s “FBO of the Week” ribbon goes to FlightLine First at Lakefront Airport (KNEW) in New Orleans, Louisiana. AVweb reader Ian Cairns called the airport to our attention this week, calling the staff at FlightLine “good folks trying to make a go of it and up against […]

Of the many tasks that we have to perform as pilots, leaning the engine is one of the simplest. Leaning is vastly easier than shooting a circling approach in low IMC, picking the smoothest route through a cold front or deciding when to overhaul the engine. Yet no subject I know seems to trigger more […]

It was Saturday afternoon at the local flight school and, as I tried to snooze in a lounge chair near the back of the room, I overheared a CFI begin his student’s Aviation as a Foreign Language training:”No,” he said, “it is pronounced ‘eh-luh-ron’ not ‘air-loin.’ “His student tried to repeat after him but still […]