Risk Management

As anyone who’s paid attention to Central U.S. weather the last few months knows, it’s been a particularly violent spring across “Tornado Alley.” Midwest storms made national news and reintroduced repeat targets—such as Moore, Okla. Well ahead of the storms and far in front of the inevitable miles of destruction images, Americans coast to coast […]

In tightly knit pilot communities, an accident often has profound effects on the group because most people in it know the accident pilot. That was definitely the case with the Larry Glazer TBM accident in 2014, in which the pilot became unresponsive, apparently due to hypoxia, and overflew his destination, crashing at sea near Jamaica. […]

You’re approaching the end of an excellent flight on a lovely day; life is good. Now, on downwind with the speed down into the gear extension range, you move the gear handle to the down position, keeping your hand on it until you get a solid gear down indication—as you’ve done scores of times. Except. […]

Ho-hum, another weekend, another engine-out landing at a beach resort. Like the one I wrote about last week, this one also made the evening news, albeit for a different reason. And it didn’t occur right on the beach, but on a busy highway choked with beach traffic. Here’s the story. It offers an opportunity to […]

During my long and colorless career as a flight instructor, I’ve been asked a few times to pencil whip a flight review. This I have never done and still would not do, although I am surprised to admit my reasons for not doing so have changed. I never believed that FAR 61.56’s requirement for a […]

Heading into a world of electric aircraft, we need to know on which systems we can rely and to what extent. Michael Riccifrom LaunchPoint Technologies spoke with AVweb at the Electric Aircraft Symposium about parallel redundancy, failure mitigation, and how fly-by-wire has set the standard forreliability in future designs. Duration: 6:46 File Size: 6.1 MB […]

2014 was the first year that the number of helicopter accidents, including fatals, declined in the U.S. Tony Molinaro, communications lead for the International Helicopter Safety Team, spoke with AVweb’s Russ Niles at HAI Heli-Expo 2015. Duration: 4:55 File Size: 4.5 MB download here

Lacking a better descriptor, I’ll call today’s blog an examination of confirmation bias. We all know this as the tendency to seek or select only that information which tends to confirm our own opinions and prejudices. I have it. You have it. We all have it, to some degree. A reader wrote yesterday to ask […]

I suppose it has ever been thus, but these days, we’re all appreciative and always looking for someone to wear the mantle of hero. That more than anything explains why that video of the incapacitated skydiver being saved by his instructor went viral over the weekend. I saw it on NBC news Sunday night as […]

Especially when looking at recent accidents involving scheduled airliners, it occurs that some people are still having problems with their landings. Yes, they can be difficult to master, especially when crosswinds or other factors complicate things and distract us. But this shouldn’t be so hard. If you’re having trouble, it may be you’re simply out […]