AVweb’s Flight Safety section offers in-depth coverage of aviation safety topics, including accident analyses, risk management strategies, regulatory updates, and pilot training insights. Designed for pilots, instructors, and aviation professionals, this section provides timely information to enhance situational awareness and promote best practices in flight operations.
In 1986, FlightSafety Internationalconducted a statistical study to compare the accident rates of piston-twin pilots who had trained with FlightSafety to those who had not. This study analyzed US-registered Cessna and Piper piston twin-engine aircraft that were involved in fatal accidents during the years 1983 and 1984. Cessna 337 (centerline-thrust) aircraft were excluded. Out of […]
I never intended to buy a twin, actually. I was perusing Trade-A-Plane looking for a nice T210 or P210. But you know how it goes…it’s impossible to resist the urge to see what Lear Jets or King Airs or DC-3s are going for. And so it was that I noticed that the market for piston […]
In the TRACON version of CA, the process starts with a primary filter which runs through all possible pairs of tracked targets and eliminates those that are more than 40 seconds flying time from one another at their current groundspeeds. The track-pairs that make it through the primary filter are then analyzed by three different […]
Picture this. You’re flying a textbook VOR approach. You’re ahead of the airplane and doing everything right. ATC gave you a perfect radar vector turn-on to the final. Crossing the FAF, you started the timer, dropped the gear, and pulled the power back for a nice steep 1,000 FPM non-precision descent. You’ve committed the MDA […]
“Preferred routes.” Hah! Preferred by whom? Not us general aviation pilots, that’s for darn sure. A lot of the IFR routes that we get from ATC are positively obscene. Either they add 50% to the total trip mileage, or they take us over the most hostile possible terrain with MEAs above the freezing level, or […]
I‘m an IFR junkie. Let me admit that right up front. I file and fly IFR on virtually every flight that extends beyond the local traffic pattern. Even if the weather is CAVU. [The standing joke among my pilot-friends is that I file IFR every time I go to the toilet. That’s a lie! I […]
I‘ll never forget the day ATC almost dealt me out. It was Saturday, March 3, 1990. I was the pilot and sole occupant of my Cessna 310. It was the home stretch of an hour-and-a-half IFR flight from Hayward to Santa Monica (both in California). I was tracking southeastbound on V459 at 6000′ assigned, talking […]
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