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Technique

Incommunicado

Airborne communications failures can be uncomfortable at best. It’s eerie hearing the radios go quiet when they should be bustling with transmissions, and you...

Stupid Pilot Tricks

Yes, we’d done as we were told. The hushed voice on the phone had promised a copy the 2019 Golden File from the Official...

Don’t Cancel Yet

The flight to your vacation destination ended a few miles short with an unplanned overnight in Virginia. The trip started from home base in...

Which Way Is Up?

Expect vigorous debate on how best to orient your moving map. Here, I’ll address that debate about the best orientation. But rather than reiterating...

Runway Incursions

During a heated conversation have you even crossed the line? Have you been told you did? Assuming so, unpleasant things happen after crossing that...

Infamous Aspen

Aspen is home to the rich and famous—senators, movie stars, and industry titans all have second homes here. Aspen is the home of the...

Build Your Own Sim

Assume you want to buy an airplane. You wouldn’t just go with your buddy’s suggestion to get a Cloudpuncher simply because he said it’s...

Going Below Minimums

Operations below minimums on an instrument approach can be quite simple if the ceilings and visibilities are significantly above minimums. But when the chips...

Questions Answered

Just like pilots, controllers get plenty of questions, comments, concerns, and sometimes complaints. Bonus: Writing these articles gives me an opportunity to address some...

Staying Engaged

Recently I attended a Rusty Pilot session and learned (or re-learned as the case may be) several aspects of our aviating world that laid...

Legal isn’t Always Safe

Sitting in seat 34F of a 737 MAX-9, I’m leafing through the dog-eared inflight magazine. It makes a big fuss about the airline’s offerings....

Minimum Altitudes

Instrument training is littered with acronyms and abbreviations. Altitudes like MEA, MCA, MOCA, OROCA can end up being the bane of students. And that’s...