Flight Training Posts

Pilots rightly obsess about losing their medical certificates, and too many of them think sport pilot, with its “driver’s license medical,” is an ever-ready, morning-after remedy for this unfortunate event. Nothing could be further…

Commenting on my recent post, LSA Pilots Could Spoil a Good Thing, a JetWhine reader said operating costs were missing from the mix. While LSAs might be pricier than hoped, “they still run at far lower operating costs— making plane ownership f…

Come July of this year, aviation bloggers will find it impossible not to answer the call to our Mecca for the first Aviation Blog Fest in history – I think. In addition to a chance to hang out with many other very cool aviation bloggers and r…

News that a flight school now offers sport pilot training is quick to catch my eye. The March 2008 the Oklahoma Aviator reported that Oklahoma’s Chickasha Wings Inc. had added an Ercoupe 415-C to its fleet, which also includes two Cessna 150s,…

Normally, Jetwhine does not post pieces without the author’s name. This is an exception since this story is from an active line pilot. We’ve changed the author’s name to protect what is left of their career. Admittedly, this is a l…

Pilots are a contentious bunch, but if there’s one thing they agree on it is that flying is too expensive. Naturally, they blame the companies that sell them the stuff they want.Affordability was a  primary selling point of sport pilot/l…

Simplicity and affordable flying for fun were the driving forces that sustained the sport pilot/light-sport aircraft effort during its 10-year path to reality. In short, it was supposed to be flying unplugged — stick and rudder, look out the w…

When the airlines start hiring, it doesn’t take long for flight schools large and small to start wailing about the shortage of certificated flight instructors. As FAA airmen certificate data proves, this is utter nonsense.More pilots hold cur…

In the February 1908 Scientific American, Wilbur Wright wrote in Flying as Sport that up to that time “men have taken up flying partly from scientific interest, partly from sport, and partly from business reasons….” But recreationa…

Following close on the heels of Scott’s Monday post about a serious lack of stick and rudder skills comes this video of a BAE 146 landing at London City Airport.  Attaching the word “hard,” to the word “landing” he…

Talking recently with Michael Maya Charles, author of Artful Flying, our conversation turned a pilot’s passion for flight, for deft stick-and-rudder skills. Why, we wondered, does a pilot’s ardor wane from the student high as flight hour…

If you’ve been a regular Jetwhine reader, you know we seldom cover breaking news.Today is an exception for a number of reasons.Just a few minutes after Cessna’s vice president of marketing Tom Aniello briefed his sales force with the j…

By Scott Spangler – scott@jetwhine.comLearning that Green Flight International had made its first jet flight powered by bio fuel in October 2007 shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. After all, turbines were all the rage when I was g…

Do you know this fellow?Scott Spangler and I recently met for the first time at a Starbucks in Oshkosh, land of each summer’s AirVenture . Although this was our first meeting in person, Scott and I have corresponded by letter, e-mail and phon…

We’ve all been following a truly interesting flying story the past few days here at Jetwhine, simply because a 6,500 NM flight in a Cessna 400 – most of it out over the open waters of the Pacific – is hardly routine. Ferry pilot Ga…

We’ve all been talking about the looming pilot shortage – as well as a shortage of aviation mechanics. Some airlines have already begun feeling the pinch as the requirements for future cockpit members have begun to plummet in a simple su…

Hello Jetwhine readers. Today we’re going to light up those little capillaries inside your cranium. You all think you’re so smart don’t you? Well, here’s your chance to prove how much you know about aviation, general aviation…

As you read this, the ugly weather should have departed California headed east and Garry Mitchell should be taking off for another day’s flying. Mitchell’s office is often a bit of a moving target, so this week he’ll spend most of …

People who fly airplanes for a living often share some of the same ailments in their older years found among other workers who also operate obnoxious moving machinery … jack hammers, high-speed riveting machines, drag racers.My wife and daugh…

For those readers who may not follow everything aviation all the time, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was taken to task a few months ago for suppressing huge amounts of safety data related to the aviation industry.The info…

A Piper Navajo Chieftain crashed just after takeoff Saturday into the icy waters off Kodiak Island Airport about 250 miles southwest of Anchorage. Initial reports indicate the left nose baggage door on the aircraft opened up right after liftoff. Six…

I was having a luncheon chat a few weeks ago with a lady pilot from Wichita when she mentioned she owned a Cessna 170 – that’s an airplane with the extra wheel on the wrong end of the airplane to some. When I realized she was a serious t…

It’s been quite a busy few weeks for the webmaster at the Cessna Skycatcher blog since the Textron subsidiary announced its plan to assemble the C-162 in China. The blog has been the landing site for a number of heated comments poking hard at …

Just when I thought I’d never again need to worry about remembering more model numbers Cessna tonight announced not only that it was the successful bidder in the Columbia bankruptcy case, but that it would rename those two new airplanes the Ce…