Aviation Education Posts

Researching the 75th anniversary of Project Thunderstorm, conducted at the U.S. Air Force’s All-Weather Flying Center in Wilmington, Ohio, from May to September, 1947, I admired the courage of the volunteer pilots, weather observers, and airbo…

Aviation is not exempt from the aphorism that what goes around comes around. When humans first flew on powered wings, their fields of operation were unimproved, what military aviation now describes as austere. (While the people who selected this wo…

As a word merchant focused on subjects aeronautical, people often ask if I am a pilot. Because a pilot certificate does not die (unless the holder surrenders or the FAA revokes it), my answer is always affirmative (pilot speak for you betcha!). Usua…

Admiring historic airplanes from a museum floor is a big-picture perspective of their contributions, whatever they may be, to aviation. Regardless the aeronautical era or the scope of the story, the viewer’s mind readily puts the winged artifa…

In introducing the Air Zoo Aerospace & Science Experience, its president, Troy Thrash said it was purposely designed “to be a different environment for an air and space museum.” There is no better example of this than the exhibit foc…

What makes the aerospace menagerie on display at Kalamazoo’s Air Zoo special is its unique airplanes, as in the only one in the world, the sole survivor of a specific make and model. With its black skin fading into the main display floor’…

Illuminating the spectrum of science, technology, and engineering opportunities embodies for people of all ages is one of the premeditated objectives of the Air Zoo Aerospace & Science Experience in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Its many hands-on youth a…

Mostly because of its alterative name, I’ve known about the Kalamazoo Air Zoo for decades, but despite a number of trips to mitten Michigan on other assignments, I never made time to visit its home at the southwest corner of the Kalamazoo/Batt…

Meeting at U.S. Air Force survival school in 2007 and reflecting on the unexpected opportunities that introduced them to aviation, Liz Greene and Kristen Franke conceived an idea that became the nonprofit PreFlight Camp whose mission is to make girl…

American Champion 7KCABAlthough this story is old, the details and the learning experiences are as valuable today as they were years ago. Rob__________________________________________________Inexperience, stupidity, get-home-itis …

Over the decades, the Young Eagles program has given millions of youngsters what, in many cases, were their inaugural flights in an aircraft smaller than a transport category airliner. This includes my kids and my grandchildren, which gives you an i…

With a week to reflect and sort the interactions and activities of EAA AirVenture 2021, my challenge was to quantify why it was the most enjoyable show of this millennium. The easiest quantifier was the people who attended. With few exceptions over …

AirVenture 2021 is really happening next week in Oshkosh beginning July 26 and the pent-up demand for aviation excitement/geeky experiences is expected to run high. Each year – except 2020 of course – the show attracts tens of thousands …

Some days, opening my email inbox is like Christmas. This day’s present was from Ryan Short, a reader, aerial photographer, and part-time flight instructor who works with students by appointment through Texas Tailwheel Flight Training. Flying …

The immediate and long-term consequences of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruling on Warbird Adventures, Inc., et. al. v. FAA, which redefined the educational mission of flight training as the “carriage of persons for com…

A pandemic addiction to YouTube has delivered consistently interesting, entertaining, and educational interludes when its selection algorithm introduced me to Ward Carroll, a retired naval flight officer who spent most of his career as a radar inter…

When preparing for a flight, it would be a safe assumption that pilots never consider their dominant learning style when ferreting out the information for their preflight weather briefing. Time, technology, and the recently published Advisory Circul…

In an Air Facts article, “Are Pilots Still Navigating?”, Glenn Mitchell reconfirmed an observation I’d made back in early 1990s, the dawn of the GPS era—for those so equipped, preflight and in-light navigation consisted of entering…

by Micah Engber, contributor(Listen to the audio)In some ways, I’m very fortunate. Some of you know this from listening to my ramblings as I muse along on The Airplane Geeks Podcast. Sometimes it might be on The Airline Pilot Guy, or with Pl…

When amateur builders complete their homebuilt projects, if their work passes muster the FAA awards them an airworthiness certificate and an operational leash, a Phase I test period of usually 25 to 40 flight hours. The certification of the powerp…

Tipped off by the movie being made about its story of Jesse Brown and Medal of Honor recipient Tom Hudner (see “Devotion: Bearcats, Corsairs, and Real Moviemaking Oh My!“), I found the book in our local library system. In Devotion: An Ep…

Photography is an activity pursued by many interested in aviation. For photographers who started before the digital age, storing slides, negatives, and prints was not only an out of space problem but also spacious signal that might suggest a hoardin…

A freshly minted CFI friend of mine called me recently almost completely out of breath with the exciting news that he’d managed to grab a few hours of loggable time in the right seat of an old Citation II, a bird that certainly turned out to b…

If you’ve already earned a Private Pilot certificate — a PPL they call it in some other parts of the world — you’ll probably remember those final words of encouragement from the government official who oversaw the checkride … …