Business Aviation Posts

Lately there hasn’t been much good news about aviation, general or otherwise. Then I went to North Dakota for a story on a one-tech avionics shop halfway between Fargo and Bismarck. A flight school was setting up in the next hangar, an indicator of …

When I wrote the second edition of Professional Pilot Career Guide a few years back, a great economy was in full swing with many more flying jobs than there were pilots to accept. If it had not been for the economy taking a nosedive  in 2008, the pi…

In our house when I was a kid, Labor Day was always a big celebration. My father retired at age 65 from life as a union plasterer, a profession few people can even define today. My grandfather on my mom’s side, John Kikulski, was one of the first pr…

Few folks I know in the aviation industry doubt the value of social media for making the industry more … well, social. Mike Miley and Rod Rakic at MyTransponder.com have developed an entire Facebook-like enterprise around the entire concept of makin…

Although most of my AirVenture 2011 time was spent getting the Wittman Airport social media presence up and running at, I did leave a little time for some of the more offbeat kinds of fun to be had around the show. This year’s award for the Best of …

Sitting on the front porch with my battered feet bared to a healing breeze, I celebrated the end of my 34th EAA AirVenture Oshkosh marathon. Delivering my second round of rehydration elixir, my wife joined me. Having made the trek herself, she knows…

Performing missions no other aircraft can accomplish, helicopters are a vital part of the aviation industry. But they are a minority among flying machines, so their presence is often overshadowed by their fixed-wing peers, especially when they gathe…

The NTSB just published its top-10 Most Wanted improvements to transportation. Beware of Number  Three, Safety Management Systems, aka SMS. For newcomers, here’s the FAA definition: “SMS is the formal, top-down business approach to managing safety r…

There’s no small amount of irony in the fact that Rockwell Collins announced it’s new “One Touch Safe Mode,” button at the Paris Air Show this week … at least it was ironic to me. The button, integrated into the avionics giant’s popular Pro Line Fu…

Reading government documents isn’t very much fun sometimes, but it often reveals informative tidbits, such as this table found on page 43 of the FAA’s NextGen Implementation Plan of March 2011. It’s clear that GA is way behind the airlines when it c…

This Saturday morning at 10 AM EST, the earth will move … or stop I guess, whichever is cooler I guess. For me, it means the first time that I’m going to visit the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian at Washington Dulles Airport. I’ve been meaning …

The Department of Transportation’s recent notice that it will dismantle most the Block Aircraft Registration Request (BARR) program, which hides corporate aircraft activity from online flight-tracking programs, has caused quite a stir. Aviation’s al…

There is some good news to report as we approach the two year anniversary of the the Air France 447 accident in the South Atlantic during the late evening hours of May 31, 2009. An unmanned submarine exploration team headed by the Woods Hole Oceanog…

Let’s be serious. When we fly on the airlines, we’re a captive audience. They can do pretty much whatever they’d like to us and we have to put up with it. But most of the time we also fly on the airlines because we must … for work, even for that muc…

Every time I hear someone use the words general aviation and China in the same sentence, I can’t help but think back a few years ago to the early days of the Cessna 162 Skycatcher. Remember the bombshell announcement, when Cessna told the world the…

The General Aviation Manufacturers Association annual Statistical Databook & Industry Outlook is like a late Christmas present that puts all other gifts or lumps of coal into a broader context.  The first edition, published in 1973, ran just 22 page…

Flight instructor pay and benefits are an integral component in creating a flight school faculty that reliably provides an education consistent with the investment made by the students they serve. Unfortunately, flight training is at the bitter end …

Regular Jetwhine readers know that a story posted here relating to the FAA is not unusual, nor is the fact that I tend not to be terribly supportive of some of the people who work there. Regular readers should know that I try — note the word try — …

The FAA Safety Hotline is a no-brainer of a customer-service tool built to offer users and aviation industry employees a chance to spill the beans about issues that affect all areas of flying safety. People can leave a name and phone number or t…

Not long ago I received an e-mail from Greg Brown, one of the many friends made during my time at Flight Training magazine (and Greg, the 2000 CFI of the Year, still writes his popular “Flying Carpet” column for it.) It was a short note to let me kn…

By now, you’ve heard plenty from me on the DOT’s Future of Aviation Advisory Committee (FAAC). The FAAC was thankfully put to sleep last month. I still think it was a colossal waste of resources to bring so much talent together in one place for a ye…

Sometimes I think we have only ourselves to blame for this kind of publicity. Business aviation seems to still enjoy that low profile, even since the chaos of the Big Three auto guys denying their companies actually owned airplanes, much less used t…

Ed. Note: I consider Rod Rakic as a friend responsible for a number of things that have changed my life, not all for the good my wife sometimes says. Because of our first lunch together a few years ago, Rod turned me into an iPhone and later an Appl…

When Janelle from CNN called for my opinion of the latest aviation security boondoggle, I had to admit I knew very little about the incident. The story focused on the Sacramento-based airline pilot who secretly recorded a security door in the termin…