Technique

There has been one light quietly continuing to burn despite the dark news of declining general aviation activity—that’s sport parachuting, you know, skydiving. While the number of pilots has dropped, airports are closing and new aircraft sales just struggle along, skydiving activity has been consistently growing. Canny airport managers looking at red ink in their […]

Our body is traditionally said to have five senses—all of which, it can be argued, are involved in piloting an airplane. The problem occurs when the inputs from two or more contradict each other thereby causing an erroneous mental picture. During instrument training most of us have experienced “the leans” where our eyes convey one […]

Further apropos of our slow flight yammering of last week, I put the skill to use on Thursday. After 119 days or so of not flying as I recover from an injury, I took the Cub up to knock off the rust. I flew down to a nice little county grass strip south of Venice […]

The Miracle on the Hudson is back in the news, with the big-budget flick Sully in theaters. For pilots, it’s a stark reminder that basic stick-and-rudder skills still come in handy sometimes. Those skills certainly helped Sullenberger, whose four decades of experience included glider flying. But in my work as an FAA aviation safety inspector […]

I am an instructor in Germany and was with a student flying to his first towered airport. The aircraft has no GPS installed and visibility was around 4-5 km in mist. We were given the entry into the control zone via VFR reporting point “November.” Tower (in a kind, investigative voice): “D-HR you are a […]

You’re in the airplane, strapped in and about to start the checklist when it hits you—filling the right half of the windshield is The Hangar. The one in the famous picture. The picture showing a Maule M-4 blasting out the hangar’s open door in full and fearless flight. Right there is where the legendary B. […]

Hundreds of pilots filled a theater in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada on Wednesday to watch a preview of Sully, the much-hyped account of the Miracle on the Hudson. There were some minor quibbles but Sandy Dubrow, who was among the pilots, told AVweb’s Russ Niles the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Duration: 4:30 File Size: 4.7MB download […]

My brother slipped me a piece of paper on which he’d jotted three numbers: 260, 240 and 180. If you haven’t guessed, they’re weights. Add me and the load is 860 pounds well-marbled (not 170-pound), above-average Americans. Add full tanks, 56 gallons of fuel and we would approach gross weight. I had yet to add […]

The producers of “Sully,” the movie based on the ditching of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009, are apparently so confident of its authenticity they’ve invited a theater full of pilots to a preview screening on Sept. 7, two days before it opens to general audiences. Warner Bros. has given free tickets to […]

Every primary student who’s at least been ready to solo has experienced a few stalls and recoveries. If they’re lucky, they also are introduced to different kinds of stalls, and how the ways we enter them can help determine their characteristics. Along the way, we learn ways to recover from them. We learn these maneuvers […]