Matt Claiborne

Pilots spend a lot of their time talking over two-way radios, which are fickle beasts on the best of days. They’re subject to interference and equipment issues. To make matters worse, pilots are often shouting over wind and engine noise. There are standard words and phrases used over the radio to make communication more straightforward.

It may surprise an aviation outsider to learn this, but airports are among the most challenging places for pilots to navigate. Planes are built to fly, and operating them on the ground isn’t always easy. They don’t have great visibility, they don’t turn around fast, and they can’t back up. Furthermore, those long wings have

PAPI lights are things most people have seen at airports but not realized just how cool they are. They’re mounted next to nearly every runway in the world, but they look like red lights to most people. From the pilot’s perspective, however, they’re an incredibly valuable tool to help them land. What Are PAPI Lights?

Like car, truck, or computer manufacturers, airplane makers struggle to come up with a recognizable brand for their products. Boeing has been incredibly successful at doing this since they carved out a niche in the passenger jet market in the 1960s. Today, Boeing planes are recognizable the world over just by the mention of their

In the hundred-plus years that designers have been perfecting airplanes, they’ve come up with quite a few creative ways to squeeze more lift out of a wing. While that’s helpful to get the plane off the ground, it’s critical to make a plane easy to control during flight phases. High-speed planes like airliners and fighter

Of all of the colored lights that twinkle at an airport, VASI lights are some of the most interesting. These lights change color depending on where the viewer is, and they help pilots find their way to the runway. Day or night, they are present at nearly every airport in the world. The VASI light

When you drive your car, you can easily control the vehicle in forward and reverse. You can back out of your parking space and then drive away, all under your own power. Is this how pilots can maneuver their planes on the ground? The answer may surprise you. No, airplanes don’t have a reverse gear.

Just like all combustion engines, jets need to begin spinning to start. Small internal combustion engines, like those in our cars or small piston airplanes, use a small electrical motor. The motor spins the flywheel, which makes the cylinders in the engine move. Once fuel, air, and spark are added in, the engine fires right

At the dawn of aviation, technology was expanding quickly every year. Planes traveled farther, flew higher, and got faster and faster. One of the roadblocks designers had to overcome was actually a limitation of the human body. Their planes performed better the higher they were operated, but the human at the controls needed more oxygen

When Wilbur and Orville Wright designed the first successful powered airplane, they knew that they would have to control the wings’ lift to keep the airplane level. To roll the plane left and right, they devised a system to warp the shape of the wings. To control the wing warp, the pilot had to swing