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By my reckoning, there have been two golden ages of general aviation in my lifetime. The first peaked around 1976, coincidentally a year when so many of the airplanes we mere mortals can afford to own and fly today were constructed. Thousands of single-engine piston airplanes were produced each year. FBOs were numerous, diverse, and […]

It was one of those really challenging weather days in the Southeast. We were flying in and out of Atlanta, and a massive weather system had the region covered with embedded cumulonimbus. This Saturday morning in April saw me paired with a fairly young check airman as captain, and we were enjoying a pretty great […]

A longtime pilot joke goes, “What makes an airplane fly?” The punch line: “Money!” Forget all that fancy talk about Bernoulli’s Principle. While it’s true recreational aviation is not the cheapest activity you could enjoy, neither is flying only for folks with thick wallets. If you keep an open mind, some aircraft are likely to […]

By Jonathan Welsh My son is reading The Great Gatsby in his 10th grade English class—the same school year when I first read it—and chatting with him about the story’s setting got me thinking about New York’s Long Island and how I have wanted for years to fly to Montauk on its eastern tip. Yes, […]

More times than not, budding pilots will think about buying their own airplanes to learn to fly, thinking it’s better to build equity rather than throw money away by renting an airplane from a flight school. Monetary considerations aside, some students believe it makes sense to learn in the aircraft they’re going to be flying […]

I admit to being a little nervous when I have to fly an airplane with only a GPS navigator in the panel, aided only by a single communications radio, albeit with flip-flop frequencies. I suppose it’s because I grew up back when things frequently broke, both in the airplane and on the ground. It was […]

As student pilots, why do we get tongue-tied with the simple press of the push-to-talk switch? It seems simple yet creates more anxiety than a nun in a smoke shop. It’s a phobia most of us have experienced at some point. In fact, we’ve all been there, done that, and lived to tell about it. […]

By David Offitzer | Illustrations by Barry Ross “Straight out departure approved, cleared for takeoff 29 Right” is a call I have received thousands of times as a commercial pilot and CFI at my home base of Zamperini Field in Torrance, California (KTOA). The seasonal “May gray” morning had predictably and gradually morphed into an […]

“Organization is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it’s not all mixed up.” These words from A.A. Milne, the author of the “Winnie-the-Pooh” series, turned out to be great advice for aviators. Flying is simply a series of planned and occasionally unplanned events. Takeoff, climb, cruise, descent, and […]

Airbus Flight Academy Europe (AFAE) marked its commitment to environmental sustainability and cutting-edge aviation training with the recent delivery of four state-of-the-art Elixir planes. These trainers have been tailored for global professional flight training organizations, were delivered to AFAE’s Angouleme, France, facility earlier this week. The recently EASA-certified full glass cockpit comes with a full […]