Proficiency

Keeping your holding skills up to date these days feels like keeping a working fax machine around; well, I suppose this might come in handy. Someday. Maybe. Holds are rare, and the most common ones for the fat middle of GA are holds published on instrument approach charts where you have to make a few […]

Were flying blissfully along enjoying the smooth night flight conditions and the panorama of lights below. The engine is purring smoothly, and, for once, we have caught a tailwind. We think to ourselves, this is why we became pilots and then we proudly wonder out loud what the ground-bound populace below is doing on such […]

At the risk of getting the metaphorical “hook” for expressing the thought, we are about to engage in herding CATs. Most instrument pilots are lucky and only have to deal with one category of ILS approach during their lives. The Category I, or “CAT I”is usually the only kind of instrument landing system approach minima […]

Thursday’s tragic mid-air between a Cirrus SR22 and an R44 helicopter illuminated a watershed of sorts. With November near upon us, the accident marked the largest number of ballistic parachute deployments for Cirrus aircraft in a calendar year, but also the lowest rolling 12-month average of fatal accidents in the models’ history. If the two […]

The aircraft involved was a 1973 Cessna T210L. It had a current annual inspection, was ADS-B compliant, had a GPS approved for IFR operations and the database for the avionics was found to be current. The aircraft was not approved for flight into known icing conditions, a concern for the planned October flight into the […]

Mark Twain once said, “If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” That’s also true of flying a Cat I ILS to minimums. No amount of training, except maybe in the best simulators, prepares you for what it’s like to reach DA and see … very […]

Seemingly for generations pilots have argued over which controls speed and which controls altitude: power or pitch. At varying times the FAA contributed support to both sides with publications outlining flying techniques and training information. The very existence of the arguably adolescent-level debates ignores the hard reality: In powered aircraft neither one works alone. To […]

Since this seems to be the season for discussing hypoxia and the threat it presents to GA pilots, I was reminded that we published this dramatic audio on AVweb five years ago. I had forgotten about it, which isn’t a good thing given what an incredible lesson it is. The incident occurred in July 2008 […]

In its weekly perusal of developments in aviation, AVweb’s staff turned up news of an expansion of SocialFlight, insurance benefits for customers of Crosswind Concepts, the annual convention of the Silver Wings Fraternity and certification of Piper’s M-Class airplanes in China. SocialFlight, a web and mobile app for finding events and interesting places to fly, […]

Sure, we know what maneuvering speed is, we learned it in private pilot ground school. You know, Va-Design Maneuvering Speed. “This is the maximum speed at which the limit load can be imposed (either by gusts or full deflection of the control surfaces) without causing structural damage.” That’s the definition straight out of the old […]