Category: Flying –  Page 6

Instrument Rating – unofficial ground school

Jeremy Zawodny has started ground school where he’ll learn IFR theory for his instrument rating. The fun bit is that he’s posting about it on his blog and plans to keep doing so. This is great, from my point of view. I’d like to get my instrument rating. It’s something I keep putting off, because…

Read more… 26 Sep 07

Why do I do this again?

Things that happened during the flight with my mother: 1) we ended up without a VFR chart for the majority of the area we were flying over 2) my boyfriend and I descended into major arguments about basic planning (mainly based on heat and nerves rather than actual issues) 3) my mother corrected an Italian…

Read more… 1 Sep 07

Malaga – Roma – Mannheim

Everything is ready for the next flight. Cliff will do the first trip IFR. We’ll be flying up the coast of Spain and then across to Menorca for a refuel and last minute check before a long water crossing directly to Rome. Then we’ll continue on IFR (so constantly under watch, which strikes me as…

Read more… 22 Aug 07

Flying Over Lake Constance

Here’s the view as we fly away from our initial destination at Lake Constance. No, you don’t get a view of us flying to it as I was busy with the plane at that point! At the wing tip you can see the airfield, the same one that I linked to on Google in the…

Read more… 3 Jul 07

He became aware of some power cables…

I love that phrasing: “he became aware” .. .it makes it sound like such a calm moment. I don’t usually haunt the accident reports (they make me nervous) but this one was someone I know. The subject came up the first time as I was doing circuits at Oxford Airport for my night rating. I…

Read more… 19 May 07

Not the best advertising!

I saw this photograph today and had to share. You can see the full story at Snopes at http://www.snopes.com/photos/airplane/flightschool.asp — what a landing, huh? Amazing that the pilot walked away, really.

Read more… 16 Jan 07

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…