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Here’s a quandary that may sound familiar. At my local airport, we have a pilot whom I’ll call Joe. Every other pilot on the field assumes he will end up in a smoking hole. Do you know the guy I’m talking about? This is the guy who takes no advice seriously; who believes he is […]

Survival or death can pivot on the smallest things. When I was kid, I grew up in the Texas panhandle where my Dad worked as a chemist in the oil patch. By the mid-1950s, the heyday of Panhandle oil production was over, but there was still a lot of drilling in the Canadian River basin.It […]

We’ve been following an incident earlier this week in which a Boeing 757 made an emergency landing at Dulles following a cockpit fire-a serious one, by the sounds of it. This incident raises some critical issues which I’ll address, but the over arching one is that if you have a serious cockpit fire, two things […]

Last week’s reports on Continental’s new initiatives to cope with the pending demise of 100LL drew a number of comments and queries, especially the diesel project.As I continue to cover this story, I am becoming aware of an interesting divide. In the industry, some seem to think that the timeline here is long-like about 10 […]

Like everyone else reading the details of American Airlines Flight 2’s emergency declaration at JFK last week, I’ve been made privy only to the sketchy details. But from my perspective as an air traffic controller, my Monday morning armchair judgment is that AAL2 may have been a bit heavy handed.Furthermore, from what we know, the […]

Behind the scenes video from the Mobile press meeting. So now comes Teledyne Continental jumping on the diesel/Jet A bandwagon. It took my e-mail inbox about 10 minutes to load up with comments. What’s Continental thinking? Have they made a terrible mistake? Why aren’t they pursuing a simpler two-cycle design like the Deltahawk?All legitimate questions, […]

Last week’s emergency landing at New York’s JFK offers yet another example of how a group of pilots-when presented with the same scenario and risk factors-may make diametrically different decisions. The distilled summary: An American Airlines 767 enroute into JFK from Los Angeles arrived to be assigned runway 22L as the landing runway. The wind […]

I don’t spend much time placing people into little boxes so, what hell, let’s spend some time placing people into little boxes. There are various ways to sort pilots by their experience and predilections and one binary category consists of those pilots who get little uncontrolled country airports and those who don’t. I think I […]

I’ve been watching the expanding oil spill mess in the Gulf of Mexico with increasing dread. I happen to live on the Gulf and that slick could find its way to our beaches here on the west coast of Florida. Alarmingly, there’s no indication that BP or the army of experts they have summoned have […]

So here we are with a new press release from the FAA ADS-B program office about ADS-B now being available in the Philadelphia area, that aircraft with ADS-B will receive both weather and traffic information service, even PHL TRACON will use it for traffic separation at 3 miles even when the aircraft are more than […]