Proficiency

 The Wall Street Journal is reporting the FAA is considering reducing the number of hours military pilots must have before they can be airline first officers. An industry-labor panel has recommended that military pilots with as little as 500 hours be allowed to slide directly into the right seat of airliners. The current minimum […]

Every primary student who’s at least been ready to solo has experienced a few stalls and recoveries. If they’re lucky, they also are introduced to different kinds of stalls, and how the ways we enter them can help determine their characteristics. Along the way, we learn ways to recover from them. We learn these maneuvers […]

Partial panel is often viewed as a loss of vacuum instruments—the gyros. In reality you have a partial panel any time you lose one or more of the required instruments regardless of how they are powered or even their particular function. Losing any instrument deprives you of information that may have a crucial impact on […]

As the pilot population ages a significant portion of the graybeards (female and male) are now interrupting their muttering about the unfairness of a pilot shortage happening when they’re no longer in a position to take advantage of it with entering into conversations as to when it’s going to be time to pull the mixture […]

How many of us are interested in fun flying? We occasionally use our airplanes for transportation, but for the most part, don’t we fly for fun? Have you attended a grass-roots fly-in and done some fun flying? If not, you should. Here’s why. Get any group of pilots together and the topic invariably turns to […]

Flying an airplane involves multiple concepts from physics: Bernoulli’s principle, centrifugal force, Newton’s law of gravity, to name a few. There’s one more natural law, though, that isn’t in the science textbooks: the faster you’re trying to get somewhere, the more likely you’re going to get unexpectedly delayed. Today’s a perfect example of that. You […]

The International Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (IAOPA) is pressing the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to adopt the so-called driver’s license medical as the standard for all private pilots. At the recent World Assembly held in Chicago just before AirVenture 2016, the 63 delegates from 28 member nations passed the following resolution: “The IAOPA […]

The stats are in, the tallies tallied and the totals have been summed up: Loss-of-control tops the list of general aviation accident causes. Recent studies by industry and government point to loss-of-control (LOC) accidents in all their variations are the leading cause of GA accidents, both fatal and otherwise. According to the U.S. Government Accountability […]

After purchasing every model in the CubCrafters line, TacAero now offers a certified five-day transition course to prepare CubCrafters’ customers for the challenges of flying a high-performance tailwheel airplane. Aviation Consumer editor Larry Anglisano spoke with CubCrafters’ John Whitish and TacAero’s Jeremy Young about the program. Duration: 5:01 File Size: 1.2 MB download here

One of the most popular sites at EAA AirVenture in recent years has been the Pilot Proficiency Center, which keeps adding new features to help pilots stay current and learn new skills. This year, Redbird is offering 12 simulators, an MCX full-motion device, and an Xwind crosswind trainer. The sims offer more than 30 scenarios […]