Excuse me but who do you think kept all those de Havilland things going all those years? Viking didn't do any of the hard work to get that junk certified. I'm very happy for Viking, I would have liked to get involved with them when I was a pup; just don't kiss off Bombardier because they learned to ...

If you havent had a rating for 18 years you could never fly anyways. You have to start over, go do a course.

My father survived the Battle of Britain in a Hurricane and my brother-in-law survived the Cold War in a 104 and an F18. The only thing you have survived is a keyboard and I have serious doubts that you tie your own shoes. I’m done. I like to say I survived aviation but I cannot abide the asinine co...

"People like me," eh? If "ilk" annoys you, how about dickhead? I won't have to define that one, you've probably been called that one before.

YOU RAN WITH SCISSORS?! Holy crap!

You might be a bit wrong: “ilk noun a type of people or things similar to those already referred to. "the veiled suggestions that reporters of his ilk seem to be so good at" synonyms: type, sort, class, category, group, set, breed, strain, bracket, genre, make, model, kind, brand, vintage, stamp, st...

Rigpiggy, the safety letter used to be the only way you could find out the stupid/sad/silly/moronic things that pilots did and how badly they or their passengers were damaged. Now its easier to get all that from the internet but it seems nobody is looking or reading anymore. Stay safe! Find out what...

Sorry, fuel gauges are a make-work project for engineers. No pilot worth his sunglasses should ever rely on them, there are much better ways of ensuring that you can stay airborne. Blowing tanks is a regular occurrence but is it really necessary? I stopped doing it in a Beaver about 1979...

Rocky, that's a very strange response for someone who was arguing about the flexibility of SOPs... I spent a lot of time training fighter pilots for the corporate world and I know of what I speak. Your superior attitude is one of the reasons the "civilizing" process was difficult. It was a lot easie...

You don’t have to worry about working for me, I am retired. Peggy’s Cove was a bad one, but then how could you write an SOP to cover flames and melting plastic dripping on the pilots? I think there were lessons learned and SOPs were changed. That’s the whole point. That argument about fighters is di...

The reason for SOPs is so that if confronted with “an event,” it doesn’t matter if you are 5 months into your recurrent, you fall back on procedures. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, don’t have to remember what happened to Bob in 1972 when it happened to him and it shouldn’t matter if you’re no...

Gauges on a light twin are only there to make the panel look groovy. Never ever trust them, never believe them, just don’t. Gawd, why are people making the same moronic mistakes? The only good thing is that nobody in their care was killed. Does our useless government still send out the safety letter...

Yes, backtrack. But the instructor pooched it by not landing straight ahead. There is one lucky sob. These stupid accidents have been happening since Orville. Lots of people have been killed doing the same stupid thing. Why would you do the same stupid thing that killed so many others? This “instruc...

Follow the SOPs. Know your QRH cold. Know the Limitations too. You are not entitled to second-guess them, just do it. The example of a Navajo running at idle? Remember what happened to that King Air in Vancouver that killed that young father and his copilot? Do you understand the drag of a propeller...

“It would be like advertising a Bud Light as a Guinness” Oh the humanity!

I flew a Racer out of The Puddle in 1979. Changed more jugs and fought my first engine fire, saw my first jug come straight through a cowling. Cold, firepots, adf approaches into private airstrips, 50’ on radar altimeter over a frozen lake, at night. F*** I’m still alive!! Not sure why...

When a/c used rotary engines, back when . and I were learning to fly, they didn't have throttles, just a kill button. You had to get good at letting the engine slow down, but not too far or it would quit cold. No starters. Not saying this is the origin, just saying.

My father helped set up Bagotville, after the Battle of Britain he was sent to Canada to instruct on Hurricanes. He was one of the first a/c there...

You guys need to recognise an opportunity when you see it - winter layoffs for me meant going back to school to get a degree, which got me my Last Great Flying Job. Some of my friends had sailboats in the Caribbean. Some had the opportunity to be stay-at-home dads. You will regret wasting this time ...

Hey Meat, a much better answer would be to delete your first two sentences, follow the QRH.

In this example this crew likely did not follow the smoke in the cabin procedure, they made one up. They are lucky. If I was the CP they would be washing lavatories for a week.

Get them to check the W&B again. When the Firecats were first converted from Trackers, they had all the tailwheels still installed. They even installed an 8D start batter in the very back of the fuselage area. Years later, after stall margin indicators were installed, it turned out that the original...

If Beaver pilots are stalling out there are 2 problems: no training and incompetence. I do remember looking for poachers with Fisheries officer (you can tell how long ago this was) in a 185 on floats, flying over Vancouver Island beaches at about 300.' We were in a tight turn over a group of people ...

Another gotcha, as soon as you land you are a boat. There are also rules for boats that you need to know about like right of way etc.

I feel for these guys because they went around, spending a bit more of the company's money than they liked, but it certainly wasn't the disaster of the century, or even of that day. Humans make funny mistakes for strange unexplained reasons and some survive, some don't - we pay all those guys to wat...

You are very welcome. Upon lots of reflection (and I haven't been here for a while) I have decided that as it adds nothing to ease of reading, I have been editing out any of the feel-good paragraphs from cover letters. I think its better to delete "from age 10 I've always wanted to fly a lawn dart f...