Decision Making
Avoiding CFIT Incidents
 The NTSB began 2008 by issuing a Safety Alert aimed at general aviation (GA) pilots. It deals with accidents involving controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) during nighttime VFR flight. The NTSB noted that some of the CFIT accidents it has investigated in |
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Avoiding Midair Collisions
 It was over so fast, it was almost as if it hadn’t happened. And, of course, fortunately for everyone, it hadn’t. It was only a blur in my peripheral vision, so fleeting that I
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Getting Out Alive
 Few topics in aviation are as popular as that of survival after a forced landing. Since the tragic September 2007 disappearance of adventurer Steve Fossett, the topic has been the subject of countless hangar flying sessions and pilot’s lounge discussion |
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Knowing The NOTAMs
 Accident investigators sometimes discover that pilots don’t have information contained in NOTAMs relevant to their flights. On rare occasions, even though a pilot asked for NOTAM information in a preflight briefing, the briefer accidentally omitted an i |
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LSA Safety
 We seem to be at the dawn of a new era of hope for general aviation’s future with the steadily increasing popularity of light-sport aircraft (LSA). For many, the light-sport license is a lower-cost entry into the pilot community. For others, the ability |
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Overstressing The Airframe
Some pilots may believe that an instrument rating and a fair amount of flight time are good insurance against getting into a situation that results in losing aircraft control or exceeding an aircraft’s design stress limits. However, without a healthy amount of good preflight and in-flight judgment, along with recurrent training that includes partial panel work and unusual attitude recovery, those two things can set the stage for getting into trouble.
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The Go/No-Go Decision
The difference between a safe pilot and one with an enhanced chance of becoming an accident statistic often is found
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The Go/No-Go Decision
 It’s probably the toughest decision a pilot must make, and it’s often tainted by factors that shouldn’t even be considered. To paraphrase the Bard, “Go or no go, that is the question.”
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The Go/No-Go Decision
Every pilot has his own tolerance for risk, but most of us who fly ferry across the oceans on a semi-regular basis have developed our own set of guidelines for when we will or won’t fly. We lik
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Tight Is Right
 It has been said that oil is the blood of an engine. If the oil is old and tired, contains foreign materials or flows at the wrong pressure, the engine’s optimum life span can be threatened. All pilots should know enough to check oil quality, as well as |
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Top 10 Pilot Errors
 One of the most disturbing statistics about general-aviation accidents is that more than 75% of them are made because of pilot error. Considering that it’s unlikely that pilots are going away anytime soon, the solution comes in the form of prevention. S
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Top 10 Rules Of Thumb
 Pilots are expected to know lots of stuff. So it should come as no surprise that they like all the help they can get when memorizing, analyzing and calculating aviation concepts. This is one reason why there’s so many mnemonics and abbreviations associated with flying. Pilots are also aided with staying on top of things by the various rules of thumb. According to Wikipedia.com, a rule of thumb is “an easily learned and easily applied procedure for approximately calculating or recalling some value, or for making some determination.”
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Worst-Case Weather Scenarios
 There is absolutely no excuse for beginning or continuing a flight into known hazardous weather—“hazardous” being defined as any weather condition that exceeds the limitations of your pilot ra |
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