Pilot Skills

Hone your pilot skills with the articles and advice below. Our sport-pilot articles cover topics of interest to novice and advanced general aviation pilots. Trust our ongoing training articles to improve your piloting skills.

December 20, 2016

Why Flying Gliders Makes Safer Pilots
Soaring gets more people involved in flying and turns out pilots with outstanding stick-and-rudder skills.

Hands on, or hands off? That’s a looming question facing general aviation. The NTSB and the FAA are taking increasing notice of the category of stupid pilot tricks called departure from controlled flight, or loss of control, a type of accident that more often than not has fatal results. While the safety of light aircraft more »
December 12, 2016

Fly More This Winter
Don’t automatically lock your airplane in its hangar this winter. The cold months can be some of the best times to fly.

Defining winter by the severity of cold weather on the North American continent can be a difficult task. In most years, anything south of a line through Atlanta, Little Rock, Oklahoma City, Santa Fe and Los Angeles has a good chance of a modest winter. Any location above 35 degrees north latitude can reasonably expect more »
November 22, 2016

Flying High Unpressurized
If you fly above 10,000 feet, be aware of the warning signs of hypoxemia. Learn how to avoid it and what steps to take if it happens to you.

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 »
October 31, 2016

Altered Attitudes: Upset Recovery Training
Loss of control is the number-one cause of aircraft accidents, even in jets, but Upset Prevention and Recovery Training can help prevent you from becoming a statistic

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 »
October 11, 2016

Mind-Controlled Airplanes?
The future is not only coming, it might be here already

Pulleys. Pushrods. Electrical connectors swabbed with stabilant goo. Aircraft have untold connecting points that translate an input to an action. And, as those long-ago games of elementary school “telephone” demonstrated, every time a command moves from one node to the next, there’s potential for corruption or failure. Of all these connection types, one holds an more »
October 6, 2016

Drone Revolution
How (and why) the game has changed

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 »
September 27, 2016

Why Can’t We All Just Go-Around?
It’s easy to fix a bad approach; it’s a lot harder to salvage one

The concept of a stabilized approach has been around since powered flight began, and likewise, the concept of a non-stabilized approach, as well. The term “stabilized approach” has been common in the airline and commuter worlds, and has eased its way into general aviation language. Once we have a label, we naturally spend two or more »
September 26, 2016

Anxiety And Pilots
While it’s uncommon in pilots, anxiety is an affliction that doesn’t have to ground you. There are a variety of treatments that can keep you in the cockpit.

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 »
September 22, 2016

Choosing VFR Cruise Altitude
How’s the ride up there? Follow these 5 simple steps for smoother flying

They say the three most useless things to a pilot are runway behind you, fuel not in your tanks, and altitude above you. So when you’re choosing your VFR cruise altitude for your next cross-country, is higher really better? It could be, but you have a lot to consider. Here are five things to think more »
September 13, 2016

(Learning) Teaching From My Mistakes
How sharing real-world experiences in the cockpit can engage student pilots

As I stood in front of 15 excited and anxious student pilots in the first meeting of my private pilot ground school class  last fall, I started to lose their attention as I kicked off a discussion on navigation tips, tools and techniques. The majority of them didn’t have one hour of flight instruction in more »
August 1, 2016

More Than Just A Gadget
How The iPad Is Making Flying Safer

Pilots typically wear their skepticism like a badge of honor. Diesel engines are more fuel efficient? I’ll believe it when I see it… Airplane parachutes? It’s a fad! That’s what makes the iPad revolution so surprising. For all their cynicism, pilots have adopted tablets and apps like eager teenagers. Just five years ago, no one more »
February 1, 2016

Aviation Risk Management, Again, Really?

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 »
January 8, 2016

Thinking Pilot’s Guide To Fuel Management
Your instructor was right. There really is no excuse for running out of fuel.

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 »
December 14, 2015

What’s All The Flap About?
Flaps are so much more than simply those large surfaces hanging from the wing trailing edges

We watched the accident unfold before us from the tall grass, 9,000 feet up in the jagged crest of the Sierra Nevadas.
October 28, 2015

Formation Without Perspiration
Formation flying needn’t be terrifying or dangerous, provided you stay loose

The assignment was simple—fly over to Lubbock, Texas, spend three days with the U.S. Air Force (USAF) basic training squadron at Reese Air Force Base (AFB).
November 5, 2013

Pilots Versus Aviators
Do you pressure the controls or move them?

Everyone reading these words has flown with a lot of other pilots.
July 17, 2012

Over Water, Under Canopy!
Saved by the BRS parachute

Cylinder-head temp gauges are creeping noticeably toward the red lines. Not good. No, this isn’t looking good at all.
November 8, 2011

The Dangers Of Noise Fatigue
Noise fatigue may be an often-overlooked cause of aircraft accidents in general aviation

I was tired. No, beyond tired. I was fairly well-whipped. There are no legal limits imposed on flight hours associated with ferry flying, and stupidly.

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