Seeking Economy, Playing it Safe: Why I fuel up more often than most GA pilots

After 31 years as a flight instructor and considerably longer as a certified pilot, I’ve seen my fair share of accidents and incidents caused by aircraft running perilously low on fuel. In the latest data (2012) listed on the NTSB.gov website out of 988 general aviation accidents (personal flight), some 50 were attributed to fuel (or lack thereof). It is impossible to tell how many out-of-fuel incidents actually happened that year, or any year, in general aviation, because most pilots who get away with landing the airplane on an airfield after losing power never mention it to the FAA. (Would you?) The good news is that the graph lists no fatalities attributed to such accidents in 2012; but going back a decade from there not all pilots were so lucky.

Read the rest of this blog entry at AOPA's Opinion Leader's Blog here.

Solar Impulse Flies, and Electric Sees its Day in the Sun Coming

Whenever you see the term proof-of-concept in front of an aircraft designation you need to think:
extremely experimental, might never come to fruition, and of course, probably going to break. The two pilot-geniuses behind the Swiss Solar Impulse perpetual motion flying machine (I say that because frankly, it never has to stop flying), Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, have been holed up in Hawaii for months now with their proof-of-concept Solar Impulse airplane because they broke it on the five-day non-stop flight across the Pacific from Nagoya, Japan, to Hawaii. That put their proof-of-concept flight around the globe on perpetual hold. New batteries had to be manufactured for the aircraft and the battery cooling system, which was determined to be inadequate for such a long flight, had to be completely redesigned and manufactured, as well.

Read the rest of this blog entry at AOPA's Opinion Leader's Blog here.