Risk Management

We’re good pilots—by and large. Getting our certificates and ratings wasn’t easy. Face it, we sweat blood training to master the skills, knowledge and judgment needed to cause an inanimate object to rise into an often unforgiving sky and return to the planet not only safely, but with some degree of panache.  In the process […]

One of the great joys of flying is a routine flight. I’m not referring to a flight that went as expected, which undeniably is the greatest joy, I’m talking about flying a routine route. If you hop in your plane on a Saturday afternoon to fly to your favorite $100 hamburger location and get a […]

As we sift through the NTSB accident reports each month, we’re consistently finding landing gear mishaps that might have been avoided if the pilot spent a little extra time inspecting the gear during the preflight, or simply knew how to recognize potential problem areas before launching. In this quick-hitter tech article, we’ll look at the […]

Beyond separating and sequencing aircraft, air traffic controllers are responsible for managing expectations. When I’m working traffic, I must ensure that what each pilot expects to be doing matches with what I expect him to be doing. Otherwise, it’s like trying to act out a play when all the actors are reading from different scripts. […]

Each month, we chronicle recent accidents we hope are of interest to readers. A glance at a random month’s entries likely would reveal that a substantial portion of them involve total or partial failure of a piston single’s engine. Yes, there’s selection bias involved—we typically try to highlight the most educational accidents and incidents, and […]

Strong thunderstorms are one of the places aviation and fear often intersect. And for good reason: severe storms have led to countless disasters, perhaps the most famous one being the Delta L-1011 crash at DFW Airport in 1985. That tragedy brought far-reaching consequences to flight training programs and ATC equipment, and led to advances in […]

If you’re like me, one of the reasons you started flying was to go places. It’s not at all uncommon for the student pilot pounding around the pattern with an instructor to ask for a respite every now and then, perhaps a jaunt to a nearby airport, at the very least for a change of […]

It’s not unheard of to think thunderstorms are only a product of summer weather. Certainly they are more common in warmer months, but wintertime “thundersnows” are common enough that I’ve seen a few. The point is that we can encounter thunderstorms any time of year, not just in the summertime. These days, it’s easy for […]

Now that we’re staring at the weather picture from the depths of winter, perhaps you’ve been re-acquainted with how fronts make an impact on the weather. Fronts truly form one of the building blocks of meteorology. In the Air Force forecasting school I attended years ago, fronts were the very first topic that followed the […]

Everything we do in life carries risk. An undesired outcome often is influenced by factors we can’t control—someone running a stop sign, for example, or a perfectly good engine deciding to fail. But many other risks of a specific activity can be anticipated. It’s why we wear a helmet when riding a bicycle, or earn […]