Wright monument

Planes, puns, and politics – who has a right to the Wrights?

This article should have been a joke. My goal was to write a satire piece that would make a mountain out of what I had anticipated was a mole hill. Unfortunately, it seems I’ve been beaten to the punch by none other than three state governments, a federal government, and some New Zealanders. I had naively believed that at most this first flight thing would be a minor kerfuffle. I was wrong. It’s a major kerfuffle.

Friday Photo: Statue of Liberty tour

This photo is a great way to get in the spirit for the upcoming July 4 holiday. The Statue of Liberty stands proudly in New York Harbor, just off the sleek wing of Dominick Amorosso's Diamond DA-40. It's also a great reminder that this flight can be made without any special approval or training, just a pilot certificate and some pre-flight planning.
GFA cloud top map

The area forecast is going away – here’s why that’s bad news

Rumors have swirled for years, but now it’s really happening: the text-based Area Forecast (FA) will officially disappear on October 10, 2017, to be replaced by the Graphical Forecast for Aviation (GFA). On the surface, this seems like an inevitable step in the transition from coded text products to graphical, interactive weather maps. But before we relegate the FA to the dustbin of history, we should consider a few important details. This transition may not be quite so innocuous.
Community at the airport

General aviation isn’t a hobby, it’s a family

People often ask me about my interest in commercial aviation, and in return, I explain my lack of interest in commercial aviation. I explain my love for general aviation, which is more than a hobby, it’s a family. My aviation journey started when I was just 10 years old, a week after meeting a flight instructor at the Lynchburg Regional Air Show.
Air Traffic Controllers don't all sleep

What to do when the panel goes dark

Just after Hollister had passed under the left wing, the transponder flashed an error message, and went from their assigned squawk code to 1200. "Huh?" says the instructor, "What's up with that?" The instructor tried to enter the assigned squawk code a couple more times, with the same result. That was exactly when the wheels fell off the cart, electrically speaking.

Friday Photo: Blue Ridge Mountain sunrise

This week's Friday Photo pretty well sums up why you became a pilot. Fitzwilliam King snapped this amazing photo from the cockpit of his PA-11 Cub, just as the sun peeked over the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Greenville, South Carolina. The rolling hills, the lingering valley fog, the warm colors of the sun, and the yellow fabric of the airplane - it's recreational aviation at its very finest.
Mort Mason 206

Saying goodbye to a beloved airplane

The flight was supposed to be pretty much a routine trip, though not really a happy one. I was relocating my turbocharged 1984 Cessna TU206G amphibian from West Palm Beach, Florida, to St. Cloud, Minnesota. Economics had demanded that I sell the marvelous ship, and I was delivering it to the buyer.
Runway lights

The hunter and the door

Night. Rain. Extremely high surface winds. Low visibility. Mountains. Less gas then I would have liked. Now I couldn’t get the lights to the runway at Martin Campbell Field (1A3) to come on. “This is how people kill themselves in small planes,” I thought to myself as I passed the final approach fix and decided to go missed. I thought back to the start of the trip, The Hunter and The Door.
ADDS icing report

Ice, acorns and blind hogs

Flying out of El Paso earlier this week I picked up a little airframe ice. It would have been a non-event for a more capable airplane, but the anti-ice equipment on 32A (pitot heat and windscreen defrost) just wasn’t up to the task.

Friday Photo: downwind for Sedona Airport

Sedona is one of the more unusual airports in the US. With a field elevation of nearly 5,000 feet, the runway sits on top of a mesa, some 500 feet above the surrounding terrain. It's a wonderful fly-in destination, but the conditions can be turbulent. This photo from Mike Landis shows the rolling terrain on short final.
ADS-B radar

When the margins get thin

Richard Collins once summed up risk management, a subject that now elicits PhD-level jargon, in four simple words: “it’s all about margins.” Shave the margins too close and you're one bit of bad luck away from an accident. The importance of those margins was driven home for me on a recent flight in a Pilatus PC-12, when I allowed schedule pressure to reduce them just a little too much, but not in the usual way.
PATCO strike

8-3-1981: the day the FAA disappeared

The recent discussion about the ill-advised privatization of the air traffic control system sent my thoughts twirling back to a day and time when the system actually came to a screeching halt and we had no system, public or private.
Jackson Hole

Old Navigators Never Die, But They Do Fade Away

One of my favorite flying memories happened while I was a part-time single-engine Part 135 charter pilot for the FBO at Laramie, Wyoming. My occasional charter flights were a welcome respite from my law office, allowing me to meet people who weren’t in legal trouble and to take them places I might not have gone otherwise.

Friday Photo: sunset over Grand Lake, Oklahoma

David and Judy Smart were up for a sunset flight in their Cessna 172 when everything came together. The sun dipped in between clouds on the horizon, throwing a soft shadow over Grand Lake O' the Cherokees, in Northeast Oklahoma. David says it's "perhaps the most beautiful sunset we have ever witnessed together." Hard to argue with that.
CB panel in Cessna

Should I touch that circuit breaker?

Checklists are great, but consider this: can you locate all of the circuit breakers mentioned in the procedures in less than five seconds? Why not? It’s a bad idea to hunt for circuit breakers during an abnormal situation.
Solo picture

Learning to fly: a serendipitous journey

I started out as a boy who was scared to death of flying and ended up falling in love with it while going to see a sick grandfather who, coincidentally, had once been a private pilot and aircraft mechanic in the Navy. There are many names for such instances of luck and happenstance: fate, destiny, whatever you want to call it. The word that happens to come to my mind is serendipity.

Caption contest #7

Welcome to our latest Caption Contest at Air Facts, where we post a photo and call on our very talented readers to provide a caption for that photo. Check out our most recent one below and if an amusing or clever caption comes to mind, just post it as a comment.
Bush pilot Alaska

Bush flying at its worst: a Super Cub caught in a storm

The wind was getting stronger, the ceiling was dropping, I still had a long way to go and I didn’t see anywhere below me that looked like a great place to spend the night. The thought of being stuck in rush hour traffic somewhere didn’t sound too bad right now.

Friday Photo: Alaska solo cross-country

Cross-countries are a little different in Alaska, as Herbert Mann proves in this photo. He flew across the Turnagain Arm, then used the Anchorage East Side Corridor to fly between Anchorage and the Chugiak Mountains on the east all the way to Palmer. He then departed Palmer behind a DC-3 and landed on the dirt strip at Willow before coming home to Soldotna. He says, "Dreams do come true if we work hard enough."
Prop strike Sonex

A prop strike, a little adventure and some lessons learned

I made a perfect wheel landing and rolled to the crossing runway 24, where I was told to take a left turn on the crossing runway to taxi to parking. The winds were now 70 degrees off my nose, and I was moving at a slow walking pace. The crosswind was causing the tail wheel to skid, but I was nearly to the parking area. Suddenly I heard a wind gust and the tail lifted into the air until "WHAP!" the prop struck the ground.