Matt Claiborne

Despite the ominous-sounding name, dead reckoning is a fundamental skill that all pilots must learn. It’s been around for hundreds of years and is a basic part of celestial navigation. Pilots and mariners have crossed oceans with nothing more. And while modern pilots seldom learn celestial nav anymore, dead reckoning is a handy skill for […]

Unlike your driver’s license, a pilot’s license is designed to be upgraded throughout your career. Becoming a professional pilot is a long road along which you never stop learning. For most pilots, this means going to school every time they need to learn to fly a new aircraft. Modern planes are so complex that every […]

Everyone knows that pilots and the aviation world in general love acronyms. This is especially true regarding weather, where international standards mean everything has an acronym or abbreviation.   Such is the case with the METAR, which stands for Meteorological Terminal Air Report. But what it stands for is less important than what it is—a simple, […]

Have you ever heard the terms “flying at the edge of the envelope” or “pushing the envelope”? Ever wonder what envelope they refer to? The flight envelope is a graphic representation of the conditions where you can safely fly an aircraft. When a pilot “pushes the envelope,” they are at the limits of what the […]

Planes are complicated machines, and every part of them is designed purposefully. Even things that may seem purely aesthetic, like the angle the wings meet the fuselage, have deep impacts on how the plane flies and what the pilot can expect from it. The dihedral angle is a design feature found on many aircraft that […]

Most people have heard of the solo flight during flight training. But it isn’t until you start learning to fly that you fully appreciate just how much stuff you have to grasp before you can do it completely on your own. Your first solo flight is a big occasion–the first big milestone in your training. […]

The numbers vary from year to year and from flight school to flight school, but it is generally said that about 80 percent of students pilots drop out before they get their pilots licenses. So what happens to those 80 percent of students? The reasons students succeed or fail at flight training are varied. Everyone […]

Have you ever been on an airline flight that did a go-around? Chances are quite a few passengers were freaked out by the experience as the plane seemed like it was making a normal landing, but the pilot suddenly put it into a power climb. It provides the pilot a way of abandoning a landing […]

Pilot training and testing are unlike the exams most people remember from school. The closest experience most people have is when they get their driver’s license. To get your driver’s license, you usually have to sit for a multiple-choice written exam and then get in the car with an examiner and drive around the neighborhood. […]

The technology found in the cockpits of small planes comes to us thanks to the trickle-down effect. Flashy new toys start in military cockpits, then transport category aircraft, and finally general aviation. By the time it hits GA flight decks, things have gotten miniaturized and much cheaper. Take, for example, the yaw damper. A yaw […]