Risk Management

There is a fundamental reason we perform preflight run-ups and engine checks before takeoff: It is a whole lot better to find problems at 1G, 0 feet AGL and 0 knots airspeed than it is while airborne. Making sure a powerplant will work as we intend before taking off is just good airmanship. A good […]

Unless your flying is limited to local sightseeing in good weather, chances are you’ve used winds aloft charts at some point. For many commercial and military pilots, they’re a staple of the preflight weather briefing, and they’re easily found on sites like aviationweather.gov. These charts are constructed by weather centers at a series of designated heights, […]

When the jet age arrived in 1959, little was known about wind shear. Aviation was focused on thunderstorm avoidance. In Joseph George’s compilation of Eastern Air Line’s forecasting techniques from that era, we find thunderstorms described in terms of turbulence, icing, and hail hazards. As jet aircraft were equipped with radar, it was assumed that […]

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 […]