A pilot was injured, an expensive ag plane was probably written off but the friends and family of an expecting couple know whether to buy blue or pink for the bundle of joy after the latest fail of a gender reveal stunt near Turkey in northern Texas. Local officials say the plan was for the […]
Not all flight reviews are equal, and rusty pilots are not at all uncommon, but I recently faced a scenario that gave me pause. It read like the beginning of an NTSB report with a stack of extremely novel circumstances. My choice was either be one of the contributing factors to an accident or one […]
When the Cirrus first appeared 25 years ago, one of its safety features was a split-incidence, stall resistant wing. Yet the airplane still has a stall accident pattern and one that has a twist: Many of the stalls occur on go-arounds. In this, the fourth in our five-part podcast series on stall awareness and prevention, […]
Weather articles typically focus on big weather makers like fronts, systems, thunderstorms, and the weather they all produce. But atmospheric stability is a less‑talked‑about process that works in the background and “primes” the atmosphere in many ways. While you might dodge thunderstorms and fly past frontal zones, stability (and the lack of it) is embedded […]
The general aviation industry has long known about the vulnerability of the engine-driven vacuum pump. This device supplies the energy to spin vacuum-driven primary flight instruments, typically the artificial horizon and directional gyro of a so-called “steam gauge” airplane. It’s an Achilles heel of an otherwise IFR-capable platform and, although conscientious pilots train for so-called […]
Aviation insurance company Avemco teamed up with the National Association of Flight Instructors (NAFI) last week to discuss some of the common safety issues and pilot personality traits highlighted by the types of insurance claims filed after aircraft accidents. Presented by pilot and head of Avemco’s underwriting operations Mike Adams, the seminar focused on data […]
For the want of an appropriately sized paper coffee cup and lid (sorry, Ben), likely tens of thousands of dollars and at least one day at the beach were lost by those affected by a mid-Atlantic diversion of Condor A330 earlier this year. The inconvenient chain of events damaged the airplane and disrupted the travel […]
In my view, there are four basic categories of aviation weather threats: low clouds and reduced visibility; turbulence and low-level wind shear; airframe ice; and thunderstorms (which may contain the three other hazards in one nasty package). When evaluating weather for a planned flight, I look at observations and forecasts with each of these specific […]
Boeing’s next generation 777X project suffered a setback on Thursday when a door blew off during pressurization tests. There were no injuries in the mishap, which occurred on the static test plane, an aircraft that is shrouded by protective and structural metal superstructure to put massive stress on the airframe, sometimes to the point of […]
One of the first things student pilots learn is how to recover from a balked landing and go-around. Sometimes, the approach is so bad that we don’t even get to the “balk” part. But when we do—as when recovering from a bounced landing—we’re exposing ourselves to the bottom corner of an airplane’s operating envelope: low […]
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