Flash

Ukiah (KUKI) has authentic Mexican food across the street from the airport. You place your order (and pay for it) at the supermarket, then give the receipt to the woman next door, who makes your tortillas on a grill and has the kitchen do the rest. Outdoor dining on benches. Plus, you can get fresh Mexican baked goods at the supermarket.

JR, from one M20J owner to another, welcome to an extraordinary airplane make and model. I can't answer your question, but I'm sure somebody on here can.

KCGE, Cambridge, Md., has an on-field restaurant with crabcakes, and a $100 crabcake is better than a $100 hamburger any day of the week. There's a very good (well, it was very good when I went there) grass landing strip right next to a restaurant just outside the Paleo Gate. The airport is Kentmorr (3W3). Restaurant and airport. You should also visit the Massey Air Museum, which I'm embarrassed to admit I discovered only because of Maryland's Explore Maryland by Air aviation promotion contest where they give you prizes for landing at lots of Maryland airports. You should definitely sign up for Explore Maryland by Air. I got the glasses but moved away before I could get the flight jacket.

Welcome to Mooneys, @FlyingCanuck. I used to be based at KCGS. Your Mooney will open the door to some great adventures. Once Canada will let us back in again, you should try out Toronto's downtown airport (maybe, based on your name, you can already fly there). For now, you can fly your Mooney up the Hudson past New York, or take a quick hop to Tangier Island, or explore Block Island and Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. And if you haven't done it already, consider going through the vetting process to fly into and out of the FRZ. I miss it all just typing this (although there are plenty of good places to fly in California for me these days, too).

Welcome. The Bay Area is a great place to fly and home to quite a few Mooneys. My M20J is based at San Carlos.

I don't usually leave the strobes on, but I accidentally did one evening in Madison, Wisconsin. The next morning, I got a call from Larry "Joker" Brennan telling me my strobes were flashing. I hadn't left the master on; my master was malfunctioning. Sometime after I had left the airport, the strobes had started flashing. That's how I got the name "Flash." (Fortunately, the battery was OK.)

I had a similar experience in rural Mississippi. What made it scary was that I wasn't expecting it. It's one thing to read about this kind of thing and another to live through it.

Nope. You always have the option to cancel flight following. I have done this when given we-don't-want-you-anywhere-near-our-airspace vectors. What would that call say? If you're flying in Class E or G airspace (and not in a TFR or a Restricted Area or a Prohibited Area), you have a right to go where you want (assuming you're in compliance with VFR minima). No, I'm not advising you to take advantage of this to loiter in an approach corridor out of some misguided desire to assert your freedom, but I do think it's perfectly reasonable to cancel flight following and do what you want if you think the controller is being unreasonable. Here's what the AIM says about a pilot's responsibilities when receiving flight following: Traffic Advisories (Traffic Information) a. Pilot. Acknowledges receipt of traffic advisories. Informs controller if traffic in sight. Advises ATC if a vector to avoid traffic is desired. Does not expect to receive radar traffic advisories on all traffic. Some aircraft may not appear on the radar display. Be aware that the controller may be occupied with higher priority duties and unable to issue traffic information for a variety of reasons. Advises controller if service is not desired. (Emphasis added.)

Congratulations on the endorsement, Paul. Very cool.

Too late to make a difference in terms of closing KSMO, which is closing in 2028, unfortunately. And it's not closing because pilots were making low passes over it. It's closing because people bought houses near an airport and then complained that there were low-flying airplanes overhead. The airport opened in 1923. I do the noise abatement departure over the golf course when I depart VFR, which is 95% of the time. I don't turn until reaching the shoreline. But I get angry every time I think of the impending closure of the airport. Rant over.

Aaron, You can try waiting until you've captured the localizer to engage the approach mode as a commenter above suggested, but that makes you do the work of capturing the localizer, which would be a shame because the autopilot is fully capable of doing that, assuming you have entered an appropriate intercept heading so that it can reach the capture point. Your KFC-150 is supposed to maintain whatever attitude your plane is in when you engage the flight director, unless you have pushed the UP/DOWN rocker to change your pitch, or you have told it to maintain altitude, or it has captured or is capturing the glide slope. My guess would be that you did not have the altitude hold engaged, and it saw the glide slope was above you, and it commanded a climb to intercept. Of course, it's also possible that there's something wrong with your avionics. My KFC-150 was, once every few hours, while in altitude hold mode, commanding sudden steep climbs. This got old quick, so I got it repaired. I'm hoping for your wallet's sake that you find out you simply failed to depress the ALT button.

Thomas, is it safe to assume you didn't make the trip because of the pandemic? If you did make the trip, how did it go? I've made the trip in both directions with my J, 64 gallon tanks, and no ferry tank. I think it's quite safe with that amount of fuel, if you follow the advice of G-SLOT and stay conservative about the weather.

Close. They're currently in a Sikorsky H-34 at the Pacific Coast Air Museum. The helicopter was made in the 1950s and was flown into the 1960s and possibly the 70s.

Flew to Santa Rosa yesterday to scout out some panel upgrades for my 1993 MSE. Photos attached. Does anybody have any experience with these radios? The state-of-the-art technology on these displays seems bulletproof; I could quit worrying about my gas discharge display making my KX 155 and KX 165 unreadable, and I would never get the big red Xs you see on the G1000s. The big crank should make tuning that ADF a breeze in turbulence. I'm not sure I have enough space in the panel, though, and weight and balance might be a concern. I eagerly await receiving the wisdom of the group.

It would seem that insurance companies must think that on a claims-in-dollars-per-year basis, instrument-rated pilots have a lower rate than non-instrument-rated (normalized by make and model of airplane), or the insurance companies wouldn't give a discount for getting the rating.

This is also likely to be a flaw in the instrument-rated vs. non-instrument-rated comparison. If instrument-rated pilots fly a lot more hours on average than non-instrument-rated ones, then it doesn't tell you a lot to say that on an accidents-per-year basis their accident rate might be slightly higher.

Thanks for posting this, DXB. I agree 100% with your takeaways. There are problems with the way this study calculates accident rates. If I'm reading this correctly, the study compares number of pilots in the cohort with number of accidents involving such pilots, but it doesn't take into account the possibility (I'd say the probability) that the average pilot with 200-300 flight hours flies a lot less in a year than the average pilot in the 1,900-2,000-hour cohort. This is a major flaw. It's of some use to know how likely a pilot is to have an accident in a given year (if you're an insurer, for example), but it seems misleading to say that a cohort that averages one accident every 1,000 flight hours is safer than a cohort that averages one accident every 10,000 hours if the second cohort flies 20 times as many hours in the typical year. (The numbers in the last sentence are thrown out there for argument's sake; I have no idea what the real numbers are.) It would be interesting to compare the data for instrument-rated vs. non-instrument-rated pilots for accidents occurring in VMC. I am glad I got my instrument rating, enjoy using it, and plan to keep on doing so, but this study is a good reminder that flying in IMC adds risk and that unless I'm above average the amount of risk it adds might not be completely counterbalanced by my additional training and experience. That's OK if I'm willing to accept the added risk and am honest with passengers when flying in IMC. The higher accident rate for instrument rated pilots at There are a lot of difficulties in this kind of research, especially if you go beyond correlation to trying to infer causal relationships between flight time and accident rate. There are a lot of potential confounding variables. One is that at the lower level of flight hours you're much more likely to find pilots with lower levels of currency; if you don't fly often, you won't build flight time, and if you have a lot of flight time, there's a good chance you fly often. Another is that at the lower level of flight hours you're much more likely to find younger pilots; there aren't going to be a lot of 30-year-old non-professional pilots with 3,000 hours. A third is that GA includes professional as well as amateur pilots, and higher-time pilots are more likely to be professional than lower-time pilots. The paper notes that there is a lot of noise at the high flight hours end of the graph because of low numbers, so it might be impossible to try to control for age, currency, and pro vs. amateur; the cross-tabs would have too small a cohort.

I second this idea from DXB. You're doing both of you a favor if you contact the other pilot and share your experience. If the other pilot thought he or she was broadcasting intentions, he or she may be more careful next time to make sure to be on the right frequency. If the other pilot thought there was no need to use the radio, your story might convince him or her that using a radio would be a worthwhile practice. And if it turns out the other pilot did everything right, it will still alert the pilot that when landing it's good to think about what you'd do if something (a plane or a deer) pulled onto the runway ahead of you. If you do reach out to the other pilot, please share the results with the group. I'd love to learn more.

I'm planning to attend, but I will check the air quality forecast before making a final decision. Today's accuweather forecast for Catalina is very unhealthy air, and Saturday's is, too. Sunday's is just unhealthy, not very unhealthy. The fires here continue to have a dramatic effect.

They generally are protected against this kind of lawsuit, but that's probably not the whole story here. Caveat to what follows: this is not an area of law in which I have practiced. ( Shout out to @Carusoam , with respect to this post, I am a private pilot only.) Specifically, federal law generally protects federal employees from tort claims for injury or loss of property, or personal injury or death arising or resulting from a negligent act or omission while the employees are acting within the scope of their employment. The story here could be that if the company can establish to any extent that an act or omission of a controller contributed to the crash (not that it was the cause or the main cause of the crash, just that it was a cause of the crash, to whatever extent), this could reduce the company's potential liability for damages arising from the crash (whether or not the plaintiffs can collect from the controllers or the FAA). @Dave Piehler should feel free to correct me. This is more his area of expertise.

Alternatively, you could fly over the Bravo, descend once clear, and always be within glide distance of land.

Amen to this. Atlanta is almost due south of Cleveland, Ohio. LA is east of Reno. Where we think things are rarely matches where they really are.

This is my technique, too: gentle back pressure (and proper trim) and you don't even have to think about when to rotate, as the plane takes off when it's ready. The only time I don't use that technique is when I'm on a soft field and want to get the wheels off the ground early and then accelerate in ground effect.

I was based at Fulton County from 2002-2009. Back then, Atlanta would clear you through the Bravo if you were returning from the South. Cross midfield KATL at 5,000 feet. It was fun, but you had to stay at 5,000 longer than you wanted to for a descent into FTY. LAX is much easier, with its special flight rules area route directly over midfield, no clearance required.

Terrific video. That is one heck of a long displaced threshold. Nice job handling that. Also, fun that JFK tower cleared you for the visual when, I assume, you were VFR. Shows how few VFR flights they have.