Flight Safety

It’s like the tattooed biker my Mom always warnedme to avoid. “It’s for your own good,” she would say. “Something like that will only bring you grief.” MaybeDelmar Benjamin’s mother never told him to stay away from thingsthat would hurt him. Or, maybe she did and he just wasn’t listening. Benjamin is a lanky blond […]

One of the exciting things about the EAAAirVenture Oshkosh is meeting some of the old timers of experimental aviation such as KenFlaglor. Flaglor, now 72, holds “court” at the communications building atWittman Regional Airport during the flying and has done so at all the EAA conventionsexcept two, the very first and the convention in Milwaukee […]

Flight schools have always experienced a substantially higherdrop out rate than almost any other educational endeavor. Thisproblem has plagued the entire aviation community for as longas I can remember, and, believe me, that’s one very long time.We can speculate as to the causes for this phenomenon foreverwithout reaching any firm conclusions. Basically, there are twokinds […]

Fair warning! I’m actually going to say some very nice things about the FAA in this column. If you don’t like this sort of thing, skip this column and comeback for the next one. Yes, yes, I’m of sound mind (well, as much as I ever am), and I am not being coerced, this is […]

Way back when the CAA (predecessor of the FAA) decreed that forty hours of training and practice wasa sufficient amount of experience and training for the PrivatePilot Certificate, it no doubt was. In fact, it was easy to preparea student for the responsibility of the Private Certificate withinthe allotted forty hours, thirty-five under FAR Part […]

You know you’re in trouble when a memo from the chief pilots starts out “It has come to the attention of this office…” Well, the FAA may be in trouble with me, because it has come to my attention that it may be official policy at (at least) one FSDO that simple failure to time […]

Knowledge Tests are required for thePrivate, Commercial and Airline Transport Pilot certificates and for the instrumentrating. If you know the material, what follows is a surefire way of passing whichever ofthe knowledge tests you are attempting, and doing so with a high score. I have used thissystem for a great many years as I prepared […]

A pilot who requests flight following (VFRtraffic advisories) or who flies IFR on a cross-country can expect to talk to a number ofATC controllers. Each controller works a sector of airspace, and as a pilot approaches theborder between sectors, the controller instructs him (or her) to contact the nextcontroller on the appropriate frequency. Complying with […]

Depart “Depart” is test pilot slang for “Departure from controlled flight.” It can refer to something as mild as a wing drop during a stall to a high-altitude “upset” that results in the airplane literally falling out of the sky. Enrichment Virtually all engines have some mechanism or device to enrich the mixture at high […]

The only other words that will more quickly capture the attention of the steely-eyed, granite-jawed airline captain are “Uh, oh, they forgot to load the crew meals,” or “Company’s talking about a cut in per diem.” The latter two don’t even bear thinking about, but we do cheerfully train for the engine failure. But let’s […]