Flight Training Magazine

Career-oriented pilots have a big incentive to progress through flight training as quickly as possible: They can start getting paid to fly earlier.

If we could wave a magic wand and take away one blemish on aviation safety, the first and most effective thing would be to eliminate landing accidents.

By Brian Delamer

It was a beautiful day for a quick flight over to Maui for dinner. A nice, clear afternoon for a flight from Honolulu International (HNL) to Kahului (HOG). 

Some pilots are on a mission. They progress through certificates and ratings with the efficiency of a checklist: everything in sequence, each item by the book. These pilots have calculated hour requirements and hiring minimums, track their progress against a mental timeline, and map out their training to achieve a final goal (see Dave Hirschman’s “Another Beginning,"). For those of us with no future paycheck at stake, however, the calculus is different.

Career-oriented pilots have a big incentive to progress through flight training as quickly as possible: They can start getting paid to fly earlier.

If you’re in flight training, you have first-hand knowledge that part of a pilot’s weekly workout routine is hauling airplanes around the tarmac.

As wildfires intensify across the United States, today’s student pilots face the increasing probability of inadvertently encountering smoke.

It’s been a busy week for Pete Muntean. The NTSB has just held a summit on pilot mental health, and he’s putting together a television news package explaining who, what, where, when, and why.

The GB1 GameBird defies easy definition.

If Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now loved the smell of napalm in the morning, there’s no better smell to a pilot than pancakes sizzling on a skillet and sausage and bacon snapping on the griddle.

Even the most experienced pilot can get distracted by a passenger or have a momentary bout of task saturation while trying to copy an amended clearance on climbout, resulting in an inadvertent deviation from an ATC instruction that ultimately gets the attention of the FAA.

Instrument landing systems enable pilots to make safe landings in both visual and instrument meteorological conditions.

After almost 40 years of flying and more than 18,000 hours, I had the privilege of declaring my first emergency last fall. 

Canadian Kyle Fowler is an unusual airshow performer. Well, actually he’s not—his airplane is.

The AOPA fuel demo Beechcraft Baron is nearing 100 flight hours using unleaded fuel in one of its engines, and so far the performance is indistinguishable from the traditional avgas  being used in the other engine.

So, it’s been 10 or 15 years since you sat in the left seat of an airplane, yelled “clear prop!” and took to the skies. So what? You haven’t unlearned everything you learned as a student pilot lo those years ago. You’re just rusty. So, what do you do?

If we could wave a magic wand and take away one blemish on aviation safety, the first and most effective thing would be to eliminate landing accidents.