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
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 […]
Consideration — or the lack of it
We were on an out and back — Dulles to Newark, Newark to Dulles. Our assigned aircraft had just come out of maintenance. The captain flew the Newark leg. No issues. I flew us back to Dulles. We landed uneventfully on Runway 19R. I applied the reverse thrusters, and then I applied the brakes. That’s […]
Night vision
Night vision is a perennial problem for pilots. Nature did not design us for night operations. Our eyeballs are too small, our pupils too narrow, and the rods in our eyes that allow us to see in the dark are located 20° off center. That is why to scan for traffic at night, we must […]
Our own slice of airport heaven
I just signed a lease on a tie-down spot at my local airport today. Got a good deal too. Paid a year in advance, so that scored me a 10% discount. For the first time in my 50 years on the planet and my 20 years flying around it, I finally have a place of […]
Unstable approaches
Three and a half years into writing this column, I finally found where all the general aviation reports to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System have been hiding. Usually, when I query the ASRS database, I get at least six reports from airline pilots for every one report submitted by a GA pilot. Not true for the […]
Rationalization vs. reason
I came over the fence at 100 mph in the Cessna 172. Even the traffic reporter sitting to my right knew I was way too fast. I saw her hands tighten around her seatbelt harness, her knuckles whiten. Halfway down the 3,000-foot runway, I’d only bled off 20 mph. Normally I’d have firewalled the throttle […]