Technique

Reading your explanation of the TERPZ FIVE DEPARTURE at BWI, which was in response to a question regarding altitude restrictions and expectations, I am not convinced that the procedure as published is clear.

Its easy to munge DA and MDA into the single concept of minimums. Yet, decision altitude (DA) and minimum descent altitude (MDA) are very different concepts. As the names suggest, DA is a decision point while MDA is the lowest altitude allowed without visuals.

A low morning fog crept onto the airport as I cleared a CRJ-900 regional jet for takeoff. The RJ lifted, passing just above the vaporous wall, and I switched him to Departure. I waited, watching for something I dealt with every day as an air traffic controller, but had never witnessed.

Wingtip vortices aren't the only type of disturbed air concerning pilots and controllers. According to the 7110.65's Pilot/Controller Glossary, wake turbulence includes "thrust stream...

Some of you are already yawning, thinking to yourselves, With GPS and moving maps, who needs VHF nav anyway? To an extent, thats a valid argument, especially regarding VORs. But, there are still a lot of localizer and localizer back course approaches out there, and you may have to fly one. You shouldnt entirely dismiss VHF navigation just yet.

After nearly 10 years of lobbying by general aviation advocacy groups, the FAA in March released a draft proposal aiming to overhaul light aircraft certification. Aviation authorities in Europe released their final report in March on last years fatal Germanwings flight, concluding that airline officials couldnt have done anything to prevent the crash, since nobody told anyone at the airline that first officer Andreas Lubitz was suffering from mental-health problems. Women in Aviation International held their annual conference in March, in Nash-ville, Tennessee, with more than 5000 people attending. Responding to a shortage of pilot applicants for entry-level airline jobs, JetBlue has launched an ab-initio flight training program, the first of its kind in the U.S.

They almost made it. The aircraft was on a very short final when the nose started down. The flight crew pushed the thrust levers for both wing engines up to stop the sink but the left engine spooled up faster than the right engine and the aircraft started a turn to the right, from which there was no time to recover.

As a pilot you most certainly know that just about everything in aviation has a checklist. We controllers have our own checklists for a multitude of hazardous situations, unauthorized laser illumination included. I pulled up the appropriate checklist while the helo maneuvered.

We listen to the weather at KLEE. The winds favor Runway 13. We have the RNAV 13 approach loaded and ready to go. All we need is to be turned over to Orlando Approach on 121.1 to make our request.

Most of us have a shelf of books chronicling our flying. There are the books we used to learn to fly, obtain instrument and type ratings, and bundles of magazines. In there is probably a dog-eared copy of the Airplane Flying Handbook, and perhaps a few others in the FAAs long-running series of manuals. If you havent used them, or if it has been a while, its worth and a fresh look-especially now that theyre available online directly from the FAA.

Youre living the good life and working the system-the tax system. You work in Portland, Oregon, with no sales tax, but live across the river in Vancouver, Washington, with no income tax. So, you can at last afford that glass-panel bird. After flying it across the U.S. to bring it home, its finally time to load the last approach of the trip: The LDA-A into Pearson Field in Vancouver (KVUO). Except the approach isnt in the GPS database.

Cirrus Aircraft officials had been hoping to deliver the first SF50 Vision jet by the end of last year, but the company said in January that schedule has stretched to sometime in the first half of this year. Mooney International Corp.s M10T proof-of-concept model completed its first flight, in December, from Chino Airport in California. The M10T, unveiled in 2014 at the Zhuhai Airshow in China, is aimed at Chinas flight training market, and will be manufactured there. The FAA launched its drone registry in late December, and within the first three weeks, about 180,000 drone users had registered. In the NTSBs annual list of most-wanted safety improvements for aviation, loss-of-control accidents repeated from last years choice for general aviation. Anticipating that Congress will consider changing how the FAA is funded in this years spring session, 15 general-aviation advocacy groups signed a letter in December asking the U.S. House to hear their real and long-standing concerns about the expected proposals.