Matt Claiborne

In navigation, we sometimes face an awkward fact of life that many people don’t give too much thought to–our charts are flat, but the earth is round. If you’re flying a Cessna between Miami and Orlando, it doesn’t much matter. But it matters a lot if you’re plotting a course from Singapore to New York! […]

The story of the Spruce Goose is a part of aviation lore that everyone should know. Like the story of the ill-fated HMS Titanic, it’s a story of the problems with making something that holds the title of “world’s largest.” If you were alive in the mid-1940s, you would know the name Spruce Goose. It […]

Many people realize that drag is a factor in how something looks or how sleek it is. But aircraft make many different kinds of drag. So to design a plane, or even just to operate one, you have to have an idea of what makes each type of drag better or worse. What is Drag […]

Everyone knows that pilots speak a language all their own, full of jargon and acronyms for everything. Weather reports are one of the worst offenders. Many of these codes and abbreviations are holdouts from the days of faxed text-only weather reports between air traffic controllers and forecasters. A SIGMET is a weather report of hazardous […]

“We have clearance, Clarence. Roger, Roger. What’s our vector, Victor?” You might be a pilot if you’ve heard that line from the 1980 movie Airplane! repeated a million times. Like all great laugh-out-loud lines, there’s some truth in the humor–pilots really do speak in their own language sometimes. A vector in aviation is simply a […]

Instrument flying comes with a huge bowl of new alphabet soup to swallow. Nearly all navigational aids and systems have identifying acronyms to set them apart from one another. NDB, VOR, GPS, and so on. But then, these systems can be combined into systems for specific uses, like instrument approaches (IAPs)—RNAV, ILS, LPV, APV, ADF, […]

Ethics, the moral principles that govern our behavior, play a key role in every individual’s and organization’s actions. As a result, aviation is not immune. Aviation is certainly more heavily regulated than other industries. But at its core, ethics studies why those regulations matter. Ethics is also applied much more broadly than simply following set […]

One of the most important things students learn on their road to becoming pilots is that they must master their own bodies before learning to master an aircraft. Flying is easy, but making good decisions and being self-aware enough to realize that you could make a big mistake takes practice. Part of this stems from […]

Shopping for the right type of pilot school can take a little research. There are tons of new terms to wrap your head around, and the dollars and cents of flight training might also look like a riddle. One of the biggest questions potential students need to tackle is the difference between Part 61 vs […]

If you’re considering taking flight lessons, don’t take picking your flight school lightly. Choosing a flight program is like picking a college. But, flight school will ultimately cost even more than college will in most instances. There’s no silver bullet or definitive guide on how to pick the right flight school. The right school will […]