Friday Photo: Orlando sunset

Sometimes it's the simple flights that deliver the best views. In this Friday Photo, college student Steven Myers shares a beautiful sunset over Orlando, Florida, from his Cessna 172. He captured the scene while doing some pattern work.
Citabria fuel gauge

The simple reason I ran out of gas

I guess it was a slow traffic day as the tower cleared me to land on that initial call. I wasn’t expecting that, but I had plenty of time and was starting my landing procedure when the engine “missed.” It was just a short blip but after so many hours in the airplane I noticed it. Then in only seconds the engine stopped completely.
Airbus A330 sim

How I crashed the sim from the instructor station

My finger had barely kissed the screen's EXECUTE icon when the simulator gave a loud BANG followed by the most violent heaving, pitching, rolling, yawing and slewing I had ever witnessed. I could hear the motion system wheezing beneath us as the simulator cab shook and vibrated.
Undercast

Caught on top, Moses on board

Fully proud of my license and confident of my newly acquired knowledge and 125-hour engine, I felt fully prepared for the 450nm trip that would take me from my home base at PDK to 5A1 in Norwalk, Ohio. For days I carefully reviewed weather patterns around my planned route of flight. It was not to be.

Friday Photo: forest fire off the wing

Jim Yares took this photo while flying his Cirrus from Buchanan Field in Concord, CA, to North Las Vegas, NV, via the famous “Trona Corridor” — a VFR path cut through the Edwards Air Force Base complex. This is a great way to get from Northern California to Las Vegas without going high over the hostile mountain terrain of the central Sierra Nevada.
Pilot in left seat

Flying solo – why everything is different when you’re alone

On those rare occasions when I am flying solo, I instantly notice how different the whole experience is. The safety record for solo flights is different too. A pilot flying solo needs to approach each flight with good habits and perhaps larger built-in safety margins. For me, that means thinking about four key areas: the condition of the pilot, cockpit habits, teamwork, and personal risk tolerance.
Squall line cloud

Who’s in command?

The chief pilot made a statement that he had never canceled a flight for weather and he stated that if he hired me he expected me to do the same. What I didn’t allow for was that I was used to following the rules like an airline pilot. It turned out, he was looking for a cowboy, who thought it was cool to say they never canceled for weather.
Piper takeoff

Reuniting with a special airplane, 46 years later

In the summer of 2008 I was looking at the pictures on an aviation site on the internet when my attention was captured by the photo of a red and white PA-20 and by the registration marks: I-CERR. I knew that back in the 1960s, Bruino airfield was owned by the Cerrina family. Was it possible that it was the plane of my first flight?

Friday Photo: Santiago, Chile

Santiago, Chile's capital and largest city, has a memorable skyline - not for the buildings, but for the snow-capped Andes that tower over the city. Gaspar Galaz was flying his Piper Archer over the city on a beautiful day when he snapped this photo of the scene. It's this week's Friday Photo.
Cessna 206 on dirt

Don’t EVER do that again

I was loaded with my precious passengers, sitting at the end of the grass, holding the brakes as I brought the power up, airplane shaking and rattling in the classic way of the short field takeoff procedure. The Cessna 206 lurched ahead on brake release and we bounced our way forward. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the fence post marker pass.
Beech Starship

Why the Starship was such a disaster

When one examines a failure of such monumental scale as the Beech Starship program, the inevitable question is, “Why did they do that?” As in almost every instance where things go badly wrong, it was a series of decisions made under shifting circumstances that led to the ultimate disaster.
Clouds in sky

What it takes to be one sharp pilot: pragmatic

Pragmatic. That does sound like a pretty good flying plan for private aviation. I say that because our flying is unscripted and flexible as opposed to, for example, airline flying which is anything but unscripted and flexible and is not always based on practical considerations.

Friday Photo: the view is worth it

Some student pilots have a unique perspective on learning to fly. In this week's Friday photo, Jason Clishe says, "As a student pilot and photographer, views like this are one of the many things that get me excited about aviation."
mountains

Tricycle to taildragger: a 2,000-mile cross country odyssey

With 30 hours of taildragger time in Brian’s logbook and 25 hours in mine, we focused in on an early model 150 hp Decathlon, and in January, found a promising 1975 example for sale. Challenge number one: we live in Surrey and Langley British Columbia, Canada, and the Decathlon was located in Kitchener, Ontario (CYKF), some 2,000 miles as the crow flies.
Taxi diagram

How to nail taxi instructions every time

Have you ever botched taxi instructions? I cannot count how many times I have made this mistake. The most prominent one I can remember was at Seattle (KSEA) in a King Air many years back. I called ground, proceeded to butcher the response call, and, because it's a Class B airport, I advertised to the world I was an amateur.

Friday Photo: San Francisco Christmas flight

How do you celebrate Christmas Day? For Dave Kramer, there's no better way than to go flying. He took this photo from the cockpit of a Citabria, as he cruised over San Francisco Bay on Christmas Day, enjoying the beauty and peacefulness that pilots love so much.
Helicopter Christmas Vietnam

Christmas dinner in Vietnam

Back “in the world” people were sitting down to turkey at grandmother’s house and snow was drifting mistily beyond frosted windows that reflected the flame-shaped bulbs of hanging wreaths. In Vietnam it was hot and humid and sticky as the four Marines sat in the troop seats and looked gratefully at Boyd.
Passengers by gate

Breaking the rules on Christmas Eve

It happened one Christmas Eve, at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, where I was captain of a 777-300. I looked out the front window to see passengers still running towards their gates, bags of Christmas gifts swinging, children struggling to keep up. I could tell from their posture and motion that they were either out of breath or in tears, maybe both.
Fighter in hangar

Silent night at the air base

I can think of a few times where I was on a quiet, I mean really quiet flight line. Once was when I was the commander of an F-4 squadron at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. In the mid-eighties Seymour was a busy operation - nearly one hundred Phantoms and a squadron of KC-135s were bedded down there.
American 707 freighter

I’ll be home for Christmas – an airline pilot’s story

When I was a new-hire at American, back in 1977, I occupied a position very close to the bottom of the seniority list. Having Christmas off was of no real importance to me, since I was single, unattached, and living in Manhattan, where there is surprisingly little to do on December 25th. So instead I conceived of a plan to surprise my folks with an unannounced Christmas visit.