FAA Posts

Call it what you like, privatizing, corporatizing, or commercializing the FAA air traffic control system will ruin the foundation of the world’s largest, safest, and most diverse and complex national airspace system. Oh, and unless we stand up and s…

Promoting aviation to ensure its future viability and growth is something important to most of us who are involved with it personally or professionally. Individuals and organizations have promoted and pursued programs dedicated to inviting newcomers…

Gathering with my aeronautical peers, I rarely participate in conversations in which they compare their cumulative and recent aviation rewards in terms of certificates and ratings earned, total hours logged, or most recent aircraft flown. While I sh…

ATC and Pilots This sounds a bit pathetic, but most of the professional pilots I’ve known in my life have been smart alecks, me included … always ready with an opinion, whether anyone asked for it or not. We’re all control freaks to some degree I s…

Jetwhine to AirVenture: Lunch for 20 Please One of the best parts of my annual trek to AirVenture is that happily, I have always found it next to impossible to sit anywhere on the grounds and NOT talk to the person next to me. Over the years I’ve ru…

To learn more about commercial drone operations, I recently attended a 4-hour introductory course for pilots conducted by Vortex UAS. The thorough presentation covered everything from history to the current legal landscape. What I did  not expect wa…

At United Airlines, does making money trump safety? A recent Aviation Week article quotes United CEO Jeff Smisek saying, “We’re going to run the airline for profit maximization …” That made me wonder a bit. Then I noticed last week’s Wall Street Jo…

Over the past quarter century I’ve read most of the Notices of Proposed Rulemaking that would affect general aviation. What separates the just released NPRM that introduces Part 107, Operation and Certification of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems, fr…

Late last year, NASA launched it Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) program to devise and test an automated system that would keep drones from bumping into each other as they performed a variety of missions. What concerns me is th…

Simply put, first-person view (FPV) is a smart phone perspective of flight. It gives the person in command of a remotely piloted aircraft a real-time look at where it is going. And it is the future of flying because it provides what people want—a …

Sporty’s debut of its Cessna 172LITE Project has rightfully attracted the attention of a cannonball launched from the high dive at the deep end of the aviation pool. While most are paying attention to the splash made by the airplane’s rental afforda…

Directed my way by a leader familiar with my connection to aviation, an Eagle Scout e-mailed me this question: “I want to become an airline pilot when I get older and I’d like to know where to start? What things can I do as a high schooler or…I rea…

Drones in the News When I was a kid my mom told me she could always tell when I was hiding something … “It shows all over your face,” she’d say. No one, not even me, believes drones this size are a threat. So what does this have to do with the rec…

Bird strikes are perhaps the greatest unappreciated risk pilots face. There are a number of reasons for this, but among the primary contenders is the fact that most strikes result in expensive airframe and powerplant repairs rather than catastrophic…

Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to The Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well. At the risk of droning on about a topic my pals David and M…

Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well. Time to Give ATC an “Atta Boy” Most aviation stories only s…

As the photo here shows, it looks like an old Aero Commander, and when I first saw this photo that was my initial identification. And then I noticed that the tail feathers were lower, and that the horizontal stab didn’t have the Commander’s dihedra…

The classroom was a 150 hp PA-12 Super Cruiser on floats How many times during an airline pre-takeoff briefing have you heard the flight attendant say, “In the event of a water landing …” Trust me, there ain’t no such thing as a water landing in an …

Note to the World’s Best Readers / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well. I wouldn’t be much of an aviation write…

Over the past century dreamers have invested in their vision of a flying car. There’s a good catalog of them in a recent New York Time article, “Why We’re Not Driving the Friendly Skies.” Expanding on the article’s headline, the author, Stuart F. Br…

Note to the World’s Best Readers / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well.  One obstacle to learning to fly these …

I had an opportunity to visit the normally closed-to-the-public NTSB Training Center near Leesburg Virginia a few weeks ago as a guest of director Paul Schuda assisted by Senior Air Safety Investigator Bill English. To say my visit was eye opening w…

Fresh evidence has been uncovered in the disappearance of Malaysian flight 370 (MH370) according to The Telegraph of London. To date, there hasn’t been one single shred of physical evidence that proves any of the dozen or so theories about what hap…

First let’s talk a little reality … Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), or drones as most of us refer to them are coming … and they’re coming soon. That’s not necessarily all bad though. Drones can operate in places that are not safe to send a manned air…