Risk Management

I cut my teeth as a pilot in the Midwest — the Chicago area to be exact — and I learned lots about weather during those days. Among the things I learned is that 97 percent of weather is safely navigable (by a qualified and current pilot in a properly-equipped airplane, but that’s another subject […]

It’s a bit disconcerting when it happens. Every once in a great while someone says something that causes your jaw to drop in utter amazement. You stare at the person who just made the statement because you can’t comprehend its magnitude. Meanwhile, your tonsils are attracting flies. It happened to me recently, here in the […]

I don’t really believe in foreshadowing, but I must admit it was odd that a Ken Hamblin column in the local newspaper sparked a spirited breakfast chat with my husband the Sunday morning of my forced landing. Hamblin, a radio talk-show host, syndicated columnist and pilot, had written about a conversation he overheard between ATC […]

Extended-RangeTwin-Engine Operations (ETOPS) is a rating granted to airlines by internationalaviation regulatory authorities that allows those airlines to operate applicabletwo-engine aircraft over routes where the time to reach a suitable diversionairport in the case of an engine failure is greater than 60 minutes. Up untilrecently, according to strict compliance conditions, airlines could obtain ETOPSapprovals of […]

OnOctober 31, 1999, 217 passengers and crew lost their lives when Egypt Air 990crashed into the sea off Nantucket Island, Mass., 40 minutes after having takenoff from New York’s JFK airport. With most of the wreckage now recovered fromthe ocean, investigators can find no evidence of mechanical failure that wouldwarrant reconstructing the airplane. Investigation into […]

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Oxygen generators are improperly placed in a forwardcargo compartment. A fire starts, and the airplane is destroyed. No one waskilled when this happened to an American Trans Air DC-10 on the ground inChicago in 1986, but the lesson went unlearned. Ten years later, oxygengenerators fueled the fire that led to the ValuJet Flight 592 crash […]

01/13/1982 16:01 LOCATION: Washington, DCCARRIER: Air FloridaFLIGHT: 90AIRCRAFT: B-737-222REGISTRY: N62AFABOARD: 79FATAL: 74GROUND: 4DETAILS: Crashed shortly after takeoff into the Potomac River and sank. Failure to turn on engine anti-icing system. Crew inexperience in icing conditions. Cockpit Voice Recorder Transcript Air Florida flight 90 – DCA-FLL Boeing 737-222 N62AF 71 (75) + 4 CAM-1 Captain’s Cockpit […]

Inwriting this article, I am reminded of the often-used patter by younginstructors in which the student is told to keep an eye on the enginetemperatures and pressures during the takeoff. The reality is that oil andcylinder head temperatures are slow to indicate trouble, while oil pressureneedles can flicker and vary by small amounts depending on […]

The FAA and I don’t agree on something — well, more than one something — but I think this one thing is rather important. It’s the way they wrote the Practical Test Standards. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I agree with the idea of the PTS and overall, it’s a good thing. It lets everyone […]