aviation safety Posts

For reasons unexplained, when perusing the FAA website to see what might be new and/or interesting in advisory circular land, discovering a draft AC 150/5200, Reporting Wildlife Aircraft Strikes, triggered my mental recording of Tom Jones singing &#…

In Wisconsin, winter doesn’t give up easily. Even when it snows again in May, a not uncommon happening, one sure sign that summer is on its way and will soon bathe us in its warm sunshine is the release of the upcoming EAA AirVenture Notice th…

Aviation safety, when you get right down to it, is an endless round of risk assessment what ifs. There is much to learn when what ifs become real life right now. If you survive, that is. Another way to learn is from the decisions made by others. Ca…

Since there’s no statute of limitations on dumb, I present to you a flight that was not one of my finer moments. My co-pilot’s name has been changed to be certain he doesn’t receive any head-shaking comments from his flying buddie…

Aviators track their flying lives one hour at a time. No matter where they are in their aeronautical journey, just starting or finally resting on retired wings. Every hour is important. Some were more exciting. Others were more meaningful because th…

If you keep reading the Aviation Weather Handbook, FAA-H-8083-28, you’ll learn that space weather reports are officially known at the Space Weather Advisory in chapter 26.7. It is a newcomer to the universe of meteorology. The International Ci…

It is that time of year when Mother Nature is in a gray and gloomy mood that sucks the Vitamin D out of your soul. The Scots, who know something about unpleasant weather, have a word for it—dreich—that beat glaikit, scunnered, and shoogle as the mos…

Here’s hoping you had a happy Christmas, and that Mother Nature’s preparatory frosty whiteout didn’t deprive you the company of traveling to family and friends. With them on their way home, and the Christmas clutter cleared away, c…

Each of us has a flying family related not by blood or marriage but by the spirit of flight. Recognizing the contribution of an eligible flight instructor, maintenance technician, or FAA Safety Team teacher can be a challenge. So why not nominate th…

If traveling from stockyard to stockyard on winged cattle cars is a fate just shy of death, drop what your are doing right now and click this link to the Federal Register: Request for Comments in Minimum Seat Dimensions Necessary for Safety of Air P…

It seems a safe assumption that the only people who have not yet seen the spectrum of aviation damage wrought by Hurricane Ian are those have endured its torments and await reconnection to their electrical and data grids. The rest of us have witness…

ADM—Aeronautical Decision Making—is a system of thinking that benefits all aspects of life on the ground as well as in the air because it is a reflective way of processing situations composed of often uncertain variables. These situations prepare us…

In early April, the New York Times reported that the National Weather Service has stopped launching weather balloons from nine of its 101 stations in the US and Caribbean because they don’t have enough helium to make the balloons lighter than …

Reprinted courtesy AOPA Turbine Pilot – illustration by John HolmBy Rob MarkIf you’ve yet to endure the two or three solid weeks of grueling classroom and simulator training known as initial, you will, if you decide to call the cockpi…

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…

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 …

Mentally treading water in Afghanistan’s déjà vu cesspool, I take little comfort in the images that bracket my office clock and remind me to live a life guided by pragmatic absolutes. In the right hand frame, some of my shipmates are pushing…

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…

Covid’s disruption of uninterrupted participation at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in 2020 was (we hope) a one-time disappointment. Like any break in a desired routine, resuming the activity is often like starting again from scratch. Whether you are …

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…

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 … …