Risk Management

Consider a route I’ve flown several times before: from the Washington, D.C., area to Asheville, N.C. Back before GPS, you eventually got on V222 at Lynchburg, Va., and motored off to the southwest. The highest minimum en route altitude (MEA) is/was 6000 feet, and flying it in good visual conditions (VMC) highlights why: This is […]

Almost from the beginning of our training, pilots are taught how to react to an engine failure. Before that, though, we’re also taught how to conduct a preflight inspection to ensure the engine (and the rest of the aircraft) is ready for what we are planning. That’s as it should be, since mechanical failures are […]

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will […]

There’s an old Buddhist saying that the fool sees only the form, while the enlightened person sees the essence. It’s strange to think that religion could give us any insight into aviation weather. But in the same way that gods tend to be elusive, many of the important details in the atmosphere are unseeable and […]

Most pilots venture into windy conditions with enough skills and smarts to know how to either avoid or cope with them. But wind-related accidents are still commonplace, so clearly we don’t always get it right. One reason for this may be fairly simple: With the exception of blowing snow, tornadoes, dust devils and some cloud […]

The untrained passenger who landed a Cessna Caravan at Palm Beach Airport last week has broken his silence and will appear on the Today Show Monday to tell the story from his perspective. Darren Harrison’s phone has been blowing up with media requests for interviews (AVweb included) since he planted the Caravan on the runway […]

Commercial air travel is by far the safest mode of modern transportation. General aviation, however, is not as safe. Many factors have improved both categories’ safety records over the years, but procedures and policies established by regulators/industry and implemented by commercial operators have been wildly successful. These policies and procedures have been introduced over the […]

Radar, whether we’re talking air traffic control, thunderstorm detection, navigation, or even air combat, is a technology that has shaped the history of flight in countless ways. The word “radar” is an acronym (RAdio Detection And Ranging) and was coined in 1939 by the United States Army Signal Corps as it worked on these systems […]

Sequences don’t come much easier. A VFR Mooney and a VFR Cherokee both requested a practice RNAV approach. They were the same distance from the same initial approach fix (IAF), and the Mooney was 50 knots faster than the Cherokee. I gave the Mooney direct to the IAF. The slower Cherokee got a few vectors […]

One of my fondest memories in aviation was the first flight I took in a Skyhawk. Even though my parents kept a kindergarten assignment where I said my goal in life was to be a pilot (after my career as an astronaut and a monster truck driver), I did not pursue aviation until after my […]