Air Traffic Control Posts

To learn more about commercial drone operations, I recently attended a 4-hour introductory course for pilots conducted by Vortex UAS. The thorough presentation covered everything from history to the current legal landscape. What I did  not expect wa…

Can Airports Help Revive the Aviation Industry? Dear Reader / Listeners — You now have the option to listen to The Aviation Minute podcast or just read the script of the show below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen a…

FAA rules alone won’t prevent a drone-jet collision By Robert P. Mark, reprinted from The Chicago Tribune, December 25, 2014 (Photo -Terrence Antonio James, Chicago Tribune) This holiday season, one of the hottest-selling toys has been the quadcopte…

Drones in the News When I was a kid my mom told me she could always tell when I was hiding something … “It shows all over your face,” she’d say. No one, not even me, believes drones this size are a threat. So what does this have to do with the rec…

Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to The Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well. At the risk of droning on about a topic my pals David and M…

Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well. Time to Give ATC an “Atta Boy” Most aviation stories only s…

Over the past century dreamers have invested in their vision of a flying car. There’s a good catalog of them in a recent New York Time article, “Why We’re Not Driving the Friendly Skies.” Expanding on the article’s headline, the author, Stuart F. Br…

AP photo of the MH17 site in eastern Ukraine The trouble with an aircraft accident that happens on the other side of the world for we Americans, especially one that occurs in a battle zone, is understanding which source speaks the truth about what’s…

Fresh evidence has been uncovered in the disappearance of Malaysian flight 370 (MH370) according to The Telegraph of London. To date, there hasn’t been one single shred of physical evidence that proves any of the dozen or so theories about what hap…

First let’s talk a little reality … Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), or drones as most of us refer to them are coming … and they’re coming soon. That’s not necessarily all bad though. Drones can operate in places that are not safe to send a manned air…

Memorial Day here in the United States is one of the days we remember all the men and women who served and perished in armed conflicts around the world since our own Civil War in the mid-1800s. The stories emerging about how poorly we treat these me…

I like hanging around with other flight instructors. Not only do they understand how an airplane flies, but they also know the intricacies of those dark corners of a flight envelope … things that can lead a new pilot down a rabbit hole of trouble if…

When my wife and I were married a long time ago, we promised ourselves that if we ever had kids and wanted to travel on an airplane, we’d just fork over the extra money for a ticket. To us, the risk of injury should they fly out of our hands during …

When the FAA tells you they’re changing the way they conduct business because they want to be more fair to someone, or that they want to save money, it’s probably time to duck. You can pretty much be sure that whatever they have in mind isn’t going …

I can’t believe I’m going to say something nice about the TSA again. That’s twice in a couple of months. I do think it’s worth mentioning that the TSA has actually created a product with value in their new TSA PreCheck card, part of the DHS’s Global…

Pardon our tardiness delivering this week’s episode, but we wanted to wait for our new logo to show up. Many thanks to @runwaygirl’s sister Anne Kirby and The Sweet Core crew for launching us into the 21st Century. On to the content. This week I’m f…

While it may seem to many of you as if the Malaysian Airlines 370 story has been going on forever, we’re really only into the opening scenes of this investigation. Remember it took two years to recover the data recorders from Air France 447. Lessons…

The past month has been one of amazement for most of us in the aviation industry as millions of people around the world try and figure out what happened to Malaysian Airlines flight 370. CNN decided to go 24/7 with MH370 coverage, while I was happy …

It’s time to get our listeners caught up on The Aviation Minute. Seems that working the kinks out of our new podcast turned out to be a bit more time consuming than I’d at first thought. Now that the iTunes folks tell us The Aviation Minute has …

Guns and airports don’t mix well … unless those weapons are being carried by law enforcement officers. Period. As the aviation industry evolves from an era of proactive problem solving to a search for more predictive solutions based on the tons of d…

Getting old isn’t really so bad, is it? Sure a few more lines and sags stare back at you every morning in the mirror, but the upside to aging is wisdom. Jetwhine’s 7th birthday is just around the corner and I like to think Scott Spangler and I are a…

Two Turkish airline pilots have gone missing. The aircraft they flew to Beirut on August 9 is just fine, as is their cabin crew, but these two men simply vanished into thin air … and almost no one is talking about them. Captain Murat Akpınar (L) an…

When people call me a “Geek” these days, I accept it as a term of endearment, especially with the advent of social media. In fact, that’s why our radio show’s called The Airplane Geeks. It’s actually pretty cool to be a geek. But it’s time to come c…

Inadequate revenue from aviation taxes on fuel and tickets, which fund the U.S. aviation infrastructure and the agency that regulates it, is how some in the FAA justify their desire for user fees to make up the difference. Before they go there, why …