Category: Excerpts –  Page 2

Cross Country Solo – Part 2

The cross country navigation exercise is required to complete the JAR private pilot’s licence. It is effectively the first time the pilot is left alone with the plane, dependent on the new skills learned over the past few weeks. It is now not simply a case of handling the plane but also juggling the full…

Read more… 9 Apr 10

Cross Country Solo (Part One)

Now that the weather has started to show some semblance of Spring, a number of students are posting with excitement having finally completed their cross country solo. This is a flight that I think every pilot remembers, regardless of how long ago it was. I put off going solo for as long as I could,…

Read more… 2 Apr 10

Stick in the Mud

Shobdon Airfield started as Pembridge Landing Ground, a long strip in an isolated area used to support Army manoeuvres. In 1942 it was upgraded to “a proper airfield” by the military. Shaun McGuire has made a website dedicated to the Hereford Parachute Club at Shobdon and has reprinted an article found in Action Stations 3,…

Read more… 27 Nov 09

Mother Told Me Not to Come

This three-part story was originally published in the November 2007 issue of Piper Flyer magazine. Part One: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother Part Two: Sylvia’s Mother Said After spending over two hours filling out paperwork at the Rome Urbe airfield, I asked the one friendly person in the place for details about…

Read more… 26 Jun 09

If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

This three-part story was originally published in the November 2007 issue of Piper Flyer magazine. As a result, I received my first ever piece of fan mail – a reader asked if I could possibly put him in touch with my mother regarding a conference that he thought she might be interested in. As an…

Read more… 12 Jun 09

Just Like A Woman

Ask a CFI has done a post on Checkride Butterflies and it reminded me of my first time. “You fly just like a woman.” I blink. I am sitting in the left seat of a Piper, somewhere over the beautiful English countryside known as the Cotswolds. On my right is Bob, an experienced pilot and…

Read more… 20 Feb 09

Accident Reports

Explosive Decompression on the Ground

The Gulfstream G150, a twin-engine business jet, arrived at Kittilä airport in Lapland on a cold Tuesday afternoon on the 2nd of January 2018, carrying three crew and four passengers.…

I am the problem: PSA flight 1771

On the 7th of December in 1987, Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 1771 departed Los Angeles International for a scheduled passenger flight to San Francisco. There were five crew and thirty-eight…

Demystifying

Small Plane Gets Stoned

This photograph has been posted to aviation forums repeatedly, each time with a thread of pilots wondering what the hell could have happened to cause the light aircraft to be…

How do you pronounce…?

This is a very interesting article by Allen Amsbaugh which was originally published in NASA’s ASRS Directline about the issues of navigational fixes which sound or look similar. The ASRS…

History

The Last Flight of B121-120

The Beagle B.121 Pup is a British, single-engine, all-metal aircraft produced in the 1960s. British Executive and General Aviation Limited, who traded as BEAGLE, designed the Beagle B.121 Pup as…

Abused fighter planes and the men who love them

A few months ago, I wrote about how to shoot down a fighter jet while flying it, the case of a test-pilot in a Grumman F-11 Tiger who managed to…

Fun Stuff

Jetpacks and Wingwalking: 2020 keeps getting weirder

Twenty-twenty was always an interesting sounding year, popular with futurists and science fiction writers for having something of a ring to it, a year in which clean fuel and commercial…

Microsoft Flight Simulator: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Microsoft Flight Simulator has released a new version, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, fourteen years after the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator X. The timing couldn’t be better, of course, with…