Flight Safety

The BE-76 Duchess is a 3,900-pound airplane with seating for four (including crew). Power is by Lycoming at 180 horsepower per side. At recommended cruise power settings, it’s good for about 750 nm (with reserves) at around 150 KTAS at 10,000 feet. The BE-300 Super King Air is a 14,000-pound airplane which is certified to […]

Aviation changes so rapidly that it’s easy to make yourself feel like an old-timer without spending a lot of time as a pilot. I jumped in right before the alphabet airspace arrived a few years back, and so I have always been able to tell those who came after me: “We didn’t have any of […]

I‘ve flown with a number of CFIs over the years. I’ve always claimed that every CFI, regardless of experience and style, has something to teach every pilot. At least, that had been my experience up until one day recently. It was then that I had to do something I’d never done before. I had to […]

I had this great idea, see. I’m always getting questions like, “What’s it like being a controller?” and, “So, what does a Safety Rep. do, exactly?” I never really have a good answer for either of those. At least, not an answer that I can give in less than a minute. So I thought I’d […]

On the morning of June 18, 2002, Scott perished doing what he loved:practicing aerobatics in a Yak-52, in the mountains of Brentwood, Calif. He hadrecently been working to advance his aerobatic skills, and placed 13th among 19pilots in his first competition, at Paso Robles, the weekend of June 8. He hadalso flown aerobatics in Citabrias […]

Buzzing and hot-dogging are the leading spin scenarios, often by highly qualified pilots who ought to know better. As Pat Veillette recently reported in Aviation Safety, the solution may not be more spin training, but more training in good judgement. This article appears in the May 2002 edition of Aviation Safety and is reprinted here […]

It had been one of those lovely, late fall mornings. You got up, looked out the window at a nearly clear sky and decided to fly the 70 miles to visit an old friend for coffee. The forecast said nothing below 4000 feet and four miles vis, so off you paddled. Coffee consumed, you shot […]

Familiarity can breed confusion when a procedure that you have flown before has been revised and you don’t brief for the approach. Even in a single-pilot situation, an approach briefing will ensure you have everything set up properly. Recently in IFR Refresher, Brian Jacobson followed the chain of events that led to an accident during […]

I was sitting in one of the big chairs here in the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport when I read that the president, on June 6, 2002, had signed an executive order dictating that air traffic control is no longer an inherently federal function. That act was a significant procedural step toward imposition of […]

Wally Roberts was born October 22,1936 in Pasadena, Calif., close enough to the Monrovia airport to see airplanesin the pattern. Around age 12, he watched a PT-13 auger in after stalling at thetop of a loop, killing the pilot and his girlfriend. For a while after that hehad a phobia about airplanes, but when that […]