Blog Posts

A sure indication of age is the change in status of a profession once held in high regard. Embodied by the airline pilot, I’m talking about aviators who gets paid to transport people or cargo on a regular run. Once a respected and well-paid po…

Stopping by Sonex Aircraft the morning of  January 28, Mark Schaible greeted me with the news that its single-seater, the Onex, had made its first flight the day before. It passed its FAA inspection just after noon, added Sonex Founder John Monnett,…

The FAA Safety Hotline is a no-brainer of a customer-service tool built to offer users and aviation industry employees a chance to spill the beans about issues that affect all areas of flying safety. People can leave a name and phone number or t…

Earlier this month President Barack Obama signed the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Improvements Act of 2010 into law. For the first time since Vietnam, it will cover flight training under non-degree educational programs.Depending on the…

Not long ago I received an e-mail from Greg Brown, one of the many friends made during my time at Flight Training magazine (and Greg, the 2000 CFI of the Year, still writes his popular “Flying Carpet” column for it.)It was a short note …

By now, you’ve heard plenty from me on the DOT’s Future of Aviation Advisory Committee (FAAC). The FAAC was thankfully put to sleep last month. I still think it was a colossal waste of resources to bring so much talent together in one pl…

Immediate gratification is one of my guilty pleasures, especially when it comes to the interactive editions of Callback, the online publication of NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System. And there is some pilot ego involved as well, a chance …

Sometimes I think we have only ourselves to blame for this kind of publicity. Business aviation seems to still enjoy that low profile, even since the chaos of the Big Three auto guys denying their companies actually owned airplanes, much less used t…

Ed. Note: I consider Rod Rakic as a friend responsible for a number of things that have changed my life, not all for the good my wife sometimes says. Because of our first lunch together a few years ago, Rod turned me into an iPhone and later an Appl…

As part of the conversation on the AOPA survey on why students drop out of aviation, we got an e-mail from Dr. Penny Rafferty Hamilton,  Ph.D. She had recently  completed a two-year research project that led to Teaching Women to Fly, which shares th…

When Janelle from CNN called for my opinion of the latest aviation security boondoggle, I had to admit I knew very little about the incident.The story focused on the Sacramento-based airline pilot who secretly recorded a security door in the termin…

General aviation is so rarely a supporting player in larger stories that this occurrence quickly captures your attention. Reading Dirty Coal, Clean Future in the December 2010 issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows wrote: “When I have traveled …

The service delivered by some ATC facilities today is just not what it used to be in the old days before the PATCO strike. There, I said it.Having been around in the old days — like the 70s – when traffic at most towers was insane by today&…

Customer service, as the AOPA student retention survey recently reaffirmed, plays an important role in the student pilot dropout rate. As anyone who has called or visited more than one flight school can attest, the quality of customer service—good, …

Introduced in Fixing Flight Training: What You Can Do Now!, the flight training individual education plan, or FT-IEP, can be initiated by students, instructors, or flight schools. It has the potential to alleviate three of the four dropout motivator…

In the overwhelming number of comments to last week’s Aviation Has the CFIs it Deserves, pilots, instructors, and flight school owners clearly confirmed the veracity of AOPA’s survey that identified the leading causes of aviation’s…

Don’t feel bad if you don’t find the acronym FAAC jumping right to the head of your aviation conversations these days. It’s not exactly front page news to anyone in the aviation industry, except perhaps the few dozen hand-picked p…

Called with the dawn of Veteran’s Day to substitute for a middle school special education teacher, I missed the online AOPA Aviation Summit presentation that conveyed the results of its survey of flight training dropouts. I haven’t found…

Now that I have your attention, temper your excitement with the understanding that this cost-saving opportunity may only benefit infrequent fliers, those who feel lucky to afford 30 or 40 hours a year. As a lifetime member of this fraternity, every …

Editor Notes: Being based in the Midwest, Chicago in particular, makes the name Siskel and Ebert and the Movies legendary when it comes to chatter about film. While neither Scott nor I are will even attempt to compare ourselves to that dynamic cellu…

Like any pilot who’s lugged a bag heavy with thousands of pages of instrument approach procedures, SIDs, STARs, airport diagrams, and ancillary information, my aching back really likes the idea of the paperless cockpit served by an electronic …

That title is what we call a grabber, intended only to make you read the rest of this short post. Without this disclaimer, some might believe that I think landing at any of these airports is a piece of cake … and I surely do not.My thanks to…

Reading that AOPA has commissioned an ambitious research project to diagnose the ills that have been decimating the American pilot population for decades, a visceral first reaction was “finally!”The project’s announcement rightly…

by Rob Mark — The fact that I grew up during the radical insanity of the 60’s is not going to come as any great surprise to some readers. It might actually explain quite a bit about my personality to a few in fact.But before any snap d…