Flight Safety

We all strive for precision and safety in our flying. If there is a recurring theme to smoothly lifting off into climb, maneuvering with a safe margin above stall, squeaking the tires onto the runway at our planned touchdown point, and maintaining control and precision even in emergencies, that theme is airspeed control.Airspeed is a […]

It had started as a run out to the Pilot’s Lounge at the virtual airport to check on plans for our annual end-of-the-year bacchanal and ended up with me wandering into a chance to learn from my betters. Sandy, our airline pilot, lost a friend of hers in a post-takeoff crash a few years back. […]

Nominate an FBO |Rules |Tips |Questions |Winning FBOs AVweb‘s “FBO of the Week” ribbon goes to 1st Class Air at KSPI in Springfield, Illinois. With storms criss-crossing the U.S. for the last few weeks, many of our most glowing recommendations have come from pilots who found themselves trapped in less-than-ideal conditions far from home. AVweb […]

This article originally appeared in Aviation Safety, Nov. 2005. We all have so-called “personal rules” we use to help us make decisions when everyday challenges arise. In aviation, they are sometimes called personal minimums and are used to help us decide whether this morning’s low visibility and cloud cover — even if legal VFR — […]

Nominate an FBO |Rules |Tips |Questions |Winning FBOs AVweb‘s “FBO of the Week” ribbon goes to Emerald Coast Aviation at 54J in Defuniak Springs, Florida. Emerald Coast brought a little holiday cheer to AVweb reader Travis Turner, who stopped at the FBO “to pick up my mother for the holidays”: She had not flown in […]

[Editor’s Note: Recently two flight instructors wrote a book on how to use Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX) to enhance pilot training and to provide sim-only pilots a guide to making their flying more realistic. AVweb is reprinting several chapters from this book, the first of which was Chapter 13 — Weather. To download the […]

Nominate an FBO |Rules |Tips |Questions |Winning FBOs AVweb’s “FBO of the Week” ribbon goes to Flightstar at Willard Airport (CMI) in Savoy, Illinois. AVweb reader Geoffrey Morsell recently dealt with some “winter weather” in that area and heaps praise on the team at Flightstar for helping him cope: I arrived at CMI just prior […]

This article originally appeared in Aviation Safety, Jun. 2005. When the spring and summer flying season returns in a few months, many general aviation pilots will realize they haven’t flown much during the winter. As a result, they usually have lost some of the skills honed during the previous year’s flying season.Up to a point, […]

Dubya had done us a favor this holiday season and officially made all of the Military Operations Areas “cold” during Thanksgiving weekend. What a guy; the MOAs are normally shutdown during holidays anyway, but a political point is a political point.Because of resting military flight crews and a generous (albeit disingenuous) president, we actually arrived […]

This article originally appeared in IFR Refresher, Jan. 2007. When a pilot contemplates an IFR flight, the focus will tend to shift towards the latter part of the trip. This is reasonable, as an approach is arguably the most challenging phase of any IFR flight.This focus on approaches, enforced during initial and recurrent training, does […]