Climbing through 16,000 for 23,000 feet, it dawned on me that I was feeling weird. It wasn’t sudden or severe, but once it had my attention, hypoxemia was my first thought. Hypo is low or below. A hypodermic needle goes below the dermis, the skin. Ox is oxygen, of course, and emia refers to blood. more »

It can be upsetting, but the attitude of most people, even smart ones (maybe especially smart ones), is that we’re stubbornly resistant to alteration, by the evidence. So here’s a fact about aircraft accidents that’s upsetting and that alters not only some cherished attitudes, but also airman certification standards, some aircraft airworthiness certification standards and more »

In August the FAA broadly liberalized the rules governing the operation of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) in the National Airspace System (NAS). The changes are fundamental ones, representing an about-face for the agency, which has abruptly dropped both the requirements for small drones to be certificated and for their operators to be licensed pilots. How more »

On a typically clear New England October day in 2006, my friend, Fred, who’s a wonderful pilot but at that point didn’t own an airplane, asked if I could fly his wife to Teterboro from the suburban Boston area where we all live. He would join us. I was a relatively new pilot, and beyond more »

We’ve been talking about how to survive our addiction to flying for a long time now, since the beginning of aviation, in fact. We’ve called it Airsense, Headwork, Judgment, Threat and Error Management, and other names not fit to print, but now we have a relatively new label for it: Risk Management. As the FAA more »

Currently, there are two ways to fly without fuel: electric flight, still in its infancy; and soaring, an aeronautical prerogative that requires no fuel at all. The rest of general aviation must learn to manage fuel. By definition, this means some pilots are bound to contribute to the statistic that one in every 20 aviation more »