Air Traffic Control Posts

Given the world’s sorry state and aviation’s place in it, hope for the future is at the coffin corner. To help maintain that delicate balance it is natural to withdraw into–and protect–our little corner of aviation’s diverse world, sacrificing the o…

As Tina Turner said when she and Ike produced their own version of the Credence Clearwater Revival classic, Proud Mary, “We never do nothing nice and easy. We always do it nice … and rough.” So here’s your chance to take a look at two videos that w…

AOPA ran a Town Hall meeting in Chicago the other night and Phil Boyer asked the group a penetrating question. How do we convince more people to learn to fly? Despite being a flight instructor and a communicator all my life, I didn’t have a good ans…

Not long after 9/11 the call went out from thousands of pilots … never again would they allow the cockpit of an airplane to be commandeered and used as a missile against ground or other airborne targets. Of course, one of the reasons the 9/11 hijack…

Come July of this year, aviation bloggers will find it impossible not to answer the call to our Mecca for the first Aviation Blog Fest in history – I think.  In addition to a chance to hang out with many other very cool aviation bloggers and readers…

I had a call today from one of the major TV networks. The reporter was hoping I’d sit in front of a TV camera for a story about the grounding of hundreds of Delta and American Airlines MD-80 flights in the wake of another FAA airline maintenance cra…

Last week’s report from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Inspector General, at first glance at least, looks like another nail in the coffin for business aviation. The DOT report – designed to show which aviation group actually uses how much o…

It really is becoming an annoying fact of my life that whenever someone mentions TV, radio and air traffic control, my friend Bob Richards seems to be in the middle. The guy is just everywhere! Bob is the author of a book – Secrets from the Tower – …

In the February 1908 Scientific American, Wilbur Wright wrote in Flying as Sport that up to that time “men have taken up flying partly from scientific interest, partly from sport, and partly from business reasons….” But recreational aviation would g…

Never in my quietest moments did I imagine the conversation about FAA and its overtime policy was going to erupt into such a round of air rage of sorts. Luckily only a few of the hostile words were directed at me personally. But the passion of the r…

So tell me how you really feel! Believe it or not, I didn’t buy everything that came from 800 Independence hook line and sinker, any more than I would totally believe something I hear from 1325 Massachusetts Avenue 100 percent. I simply published pa…

I apologize if what I’m about to say causes anyone to cough up their lunch, but I’m going to completely agree with something that former FAA Administrator and now current Aerospace Industries CEO Marion Blakey said a few months ago. Yes, agree … at …

For those readers who may not follow everything aviation all the time, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was taken to task a few months ago for suppressing huge amounts of safety data related to the aviation industry. The info…

Another editor for a world-famous aviation magazine told me not long ago that he actually read my Jetwhine piece about the classic airline menus from a few decades back. Actually I think they harkened back to another lifetime in this industry. Besid…

To most people, the word deal implies something too good to miss … think, “Let’s Make a Deal,” or “No Big Deal.” But in aviation, and air traffic control specifically, a deal is an ugly gremlin of a phrase that implies a problem – a big problem – to…

Knowing when to call for help is a critical element in learning to fly, in fact, it’s pretty darned important for survival in life as well. In an emergency, most people often don’t have the mental and sometimes the physical skills to see them throu…

A Piper Navajo Chieftain crashed just after takeoff Saturday into the icy waters off Kodiak Island Airport about 250 miles southwest of Anchorage. Initial reports indicate the left nose baggage door on the aircraft opened up right after liftoff. Six…

Did you see the note last week from the United branch of the Air Line Pilots Association? United pilots didn’t want to take the heat for the huge round of delays and flight cancellations that good old UAL dropped on passengers around the system when…

A friend in DC just e-mailed this update to the Jetwhine news room. From the wastelands of New Mexico comes the news – no, Eclipse is fine, for now. This is certain to become THE news story of 2007, from the same state that brought you presidential …

Now that Senator Dick Durbin (D)IL has demanded action from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Inspector General we can only hope acting FAA administrator Bobby Sturgell is listening. The problem at hand is not really a tough one and is somethi…

Some of you might recall a post from a few months back in which I expressed disdain that former ALPA president Duane Woerth had in a Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post, signed on to the same old tired airline/FAA line about what’s wrong wit…

The National Transportation Safety Board met Thursday to talk about an industry epidemic … pilot fatigue. It’s about time. The Air Line Pilots Association folks were nice enough to let me write an article about fatigue in their magazine … 18 years a…

Jim Ott wrote an interesting article in last week’s Aviation Week and Space Technology called Surly Skies about … what else, airline travel. He said, “Any adaptation airlines make to counter the negatives of air travel seem to be useless … amid the …

NASA’s administrator Michael Griffin said he made a mistake the other day and for many people that was enough. People do make mistakes and he said he was sorry. Griffin was answering demands from the public and the press about his agency’s refusal t…