Definition. Airworthiness has a number of aspects which relate to the legal and physical state of an aircraft. According to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) (1998), the term airworthy “iswhen an aircraft or one of its component parts meets its type design and is in a condi...
You always follow a checklist. This doesn’t have to mean mindlessly reading the factory checklist (I like to use my own version of the POH checklist), but you should use something. The 25,000-hour airline captain definitely knows how to start the engine on his Boeing, but he still uses...
The 172 record in non-fatal accidents is better than the record for the private aviation fleet but this has to be taken with a lot of grains of salt. An airplane has to be substantially damaged, or someone has to be hurt more than just a little, for an event to the classified as an...
P.S. I appeared on “60 Minutes” and wrote the articles in Aviation Consumer that led, eventually, to the DOT study and, finally, the FAA demand that Beech substantiate the V-tail design. After all these years — and stalwart defenses of Beech in the popular aviation press — I believ...
So what’s the big deal? Wouldn’t using the POH numbers provide an extra margin of safety? The answer is NO. We have many fatal accidents every year because pilots were flying too fast on approach. Or too slow because they were not at 1G. They were all flying at the wrong AOA!