Blogging Posts

Last weekend I had the honor of being a guest on Airplane Geeks, thanks to my JetWhine.com co-conspirator Rob Mark, who is one of the quartet of regulars. It was my inaugural podcast (Episode 101), and I greatly enjoyed the wide ranging aviation con…

Is it karma that led NPR to broadcast a story on the dwindling number of student pilots in June? It reported an FAA estimate that this year’s number of student pilot certificates would total less than 60,000, a “10 year low.” If you remember, June 1…

Flight schools and instructors nationwide should be paying close attention to California Assembly Bill 48 (AB-48), which imposes new requirements (and fees that pay for their administration by the Bureau of Private Post-secondary Education) on those…

Pilots earn their certificates for many reasons, but it’s been my experience that they only keep flying after the checkride if they have a goal, a purpose for being airborne more satisfying and fulfilling than the empty aeronautical nourishment of t…

Discussion over the state of professional pilot training is continuing several weeks after we posted Pro Pilot Training Evolving to Industry Needs.  Proficiency-based training has been a central theme, as has educating pilots past the bare minimums …

OK, I might as well just come out and say it right from the start … I’m pretty miffed. But I’ve actually been angry since the NBAA convention in Florida last fall when I heard Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinist…

Several days ago I read a New York Times Op-Ed piece, Leading With Two Minds. In it, David Brooks described how the US Army, in five short years, had reshaped itself to fight insurgencies with something other than overwhelming force. Thirty-five y…

Despite my buddy Scott Spangler’s somewhat guarded endorsement of the international Learn-to-Fly Day scheduled for May 15th, I’m jumping on the bandwagon next Saturday at our local flying club in Chicago. Events are taking place in 147 cities across…

On October 11, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Assembly Bill 48, the California Private Postsecondary Education Act of 2009. To summarize the act’s 57 pages of tiny type, it gives students a financial parachute should the private sc…

Celebrating her birthday at our favorite brewpub, my wife was spending part of the quarter-billion dollar Powerball lottery prize just before the drawing that gave it to a Missouri convenience store worker instead of her and a pool of coworkers. S…

Recently I received a release from Sporty’s Pilot Shop about its new CD or downloadable training course, Virtual Tips & Tricks for the Manual E6B. Not a week or so later I read that Sporty’s will soon have its iPhone E-6B app ready for download, joi…

For the past week or so a number of us have been engaged in an ongoing discussion on flight training, inspired by Pro Pilot Training Evolving to Industry Needs, about the forthcoming end Danny Webster’s program. This discussion has focused on train…

For more than two decades the GA industry and the companies that make a living from it have launched a handful of programs designed to get people who look up to act on their aviation interests. When Flight Training magazine was launched in 1989, it …

Last week a number of sources, including the Nashua Telegraph, reported that Daniel Webster College was phasing out its professional pilot training program. It’s not the first flight training program to close, nor will it be the last, but that it i…

Wandering through the Sunday paper a 200-word AP news item, datelined Williston,  caught my eye: 3 Die After Planes Collide Over Florida. Three people died when a Piper and homebuilt airplane met in a clear, sunny Saturday sky over central Florida. …

Reaction to the AOPA Air Safety Foundation’s Nall Report on the safety record of amateur-built experimental aircraft, and comments about my recent post on this subject (The Internet & Homebuilt Aircraft Accidents), led to the somber reflection that …

Sunny and 42 degrees, the saturated blue sky is the first crack in the Wisconsin winter. Planted in the driveway like a human heliotrope I turned and opened my eyes in search of honking geese and squawking sandhill cranes, pathfinders for northbound…

The sharp increase in the number of accidents involving amateur-built experimental aircraft is the most disturbing piece of data in the recently released 2009 Nall Report. Published by the AOPA Air Safety Foundation, it dissected and analyzed 2008’…

The FAA published the final rule on 22 proposed improvements to sport pilot certification and operation in the February 1, 2010 Federal Register.  It’s taken me a month to brew the courage to read it because I felt that a number of them would take s…

I have a confession. I’m responsible for much of the hate spewed at my friends Christi Day and Linda Rutherford at Southwest Airlines when a Southwest pilot tossed director Kevin Smith off a flight last week. The aircraft captain decided Smith was …

At a fundamental level I understand the technology that makes no-pilot, remotely controlled aircraft work. And it seems to work well in fixed-wing aircraft that fly high in the controlled airspace (see UAV Pilot Shortage & Military Intelligence   an…

One of the greatest joys I found in flying was diverting to some intended destination, usually to hide out from the weather. These stops were not an inconvenience to my schedule, they were an opportunity for adventure, to explore someplace I’d never…

Ground school has been—and always will be—the most important part of learning to fly any aircraft. Whether it’s a Skyhawk with steam gauges or a glass-packed Skycatcher, the flying machine itself is just a training aid, the training tool where stud…

A subscriber to the FAA Safety Team notices, I immediately open and read emails with “Emergency Notice” in the subject line. On Saturday, January 16, Emergency Notice NOTC 2101 said: “The FAA has been made aware of an issue with an update to a nav…