Flight Safety

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 […]

Nominate an FBO |Rules |Tips |Questions |Winning FBOs Hands down, our latest “FBO of the Week” ribbon goes to Columbia Air Services at Southern Vermont Regional Airport (KRUT) in Rutland, Vermont. The Cessna Pilots Society recently held their annual gathering in Rutland, and praise for the FBO has been pouring in to AVweb ever since […]

This article originally appeared in Aviation Safety, Aug. 2007. Unless you’re someone like Sean Tucker or Patty Wagstaff, or one of the Blue Angels, you probably spend most of your time in the left seat of an airplane flying it straight and level. I know I do, since I’m usually going somewhere, even if it’s […]

“That’s by far the best Flight Review I’ve ever had.” That’s among the greatest praise a flight instructor can receive. It was even more meaningful given the man who said it has actively flown for decades, and has seen his share of required, recurrent training. I don’t quote his comment to boast; instead, I repeat […]