Presidential TFRs are complicated. These flight restrictions are temporary and, often, the boundaries keep moving. Furthermore, they can occur without warning anytime a president decides to travel. They are kind of like pop-up summer thunderstorms. They’re avoidable, but a pilot sometimes has to use every available resource to avoid them. A search of NASA’s Aviation Safety […]
Human Factors
Trust but verify redux
I flew co-pilot on a 19-seat turboprop during my airline pilot rookie year. One hot summer day, we landed at Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport (KROA), deplaned our passengers, and loaded up 19 more. We didn’t take on any more fuel because we needed to be as light as possible for the windy, high, hot and humid […]
Human Factors: Elevators
I had a flight instructor once demonstrate how to take off, fly a pattern, and land a Cessna 172 using only power, rudder, and trim controls. Many years later another flight instructor demonstrated the same thing to me during a Boeing 717 simulator session. Granted, both departures were long, flat climb-outs. The approaches were also […]
Nobody’s flying the plane
During one of my airline simulator training sessions, the instructor put us about 10 miles from an initial approach fix, then she asked us to turn around so she could show us something. So focused were we on her, the first officer and I forgot to pay attention to the thrust levers. While she was […]
Human Factors: Ambiguity
GPS and air data computers make en route navigation the most precise it’s been in aviation history. In some ways, too precise. Transoceanic airliners began to suffer hours of sustained turbulence caused by dozens and dozens of wide-body aircraft flying on the same track, through each other’s wake vortices. Eventually, international airlines flying those routes […]
Droning on
I checked off a New Year’s resolution in 2017 when I successfully added Unmanned, small Aircraft System Remote Pilot to my list of pilot certifications. I am one of the more than 23,000 people who has earned that license since the FAA began issuing it in 2013. More than 23,000 licenses in only four years […]
Human Factors: Self-inflicted
Last year I gifted my readers with stories of men and women pilots who acted heroically, and lived to tell about it. This holiday season I’m going in a different direction. The Aviation Safety Reporting System reports I chose this time come from pilots who, in their own way, shot themselves in the proverbial foot. Failure […]
Ditching
My last column, “Asleep at the Yoke,” included a report about a Piper Seneca pilot who had to ditch his airplane in the Gulf of Mexico. The thought of having to ditch an aircraft intrigued me, especially when I realized there is a different psychology to the act of ditching vs. an intentional forced landing […]
Asleep at the yoke
Falling asleep while flying is something I’ve never done. I remember reading about a flight crew who did, overflying their Hawaiian island destination. I wondered what those two pilots felt in that moment when they both suddenly awoke with land and the airport well behind them. I can only imagine the gut-wrenching feeling they must […]