Tires are one of the most forgotten parts of our airplanes. After all, we spend a majority of our time flying through the air, our tires getting a “free ride,” as it were, not in contact with the ground. To the dismay of engineers and aircraft designers everywhere, most of the time an aircraft is in use, its tires are just sitting there being heavy. Unfortunately, because of their seemingly secondary role, pilots tend to neglect their tires to some extent, downplaying problems that could eventually come back to bite them in the tail – HARD!

Most aircraft engines are limited by the structure of the atmosphere -- the higher you go, the less air is available to create power. Turbocharging, or mechanically compressing inlet air to provide more power at altitude, overcomes this limitation by boosting the air pressure to something greater than “natural” levels. Turbocharged engines particularly shine above 10,000 feet MSL, where sea-level (or greater) power is combined with reduced air resistance to provide spectacular true airspeeds.

It seems that the most obvious thing can become elusive when you don't concentrate on the details. A pilot and controller together looked past the obvious and almost caused a tragedy in Charlotte, North Carolina, one night.

Some years ago I was deposed as an expert witness in the case of an aircraft accident. The aircraft manufacturer was being sued over a fatal accident where the airplane's cabin door had popped open just after takeoff and the airplane stalled.

When I heard about this story, I nearly fell out of my chair. A pilot and his passengers, with a flight plan on file but according to the NTSB's preliminary report not activated, had to wait an hour before he was cleared into the Washington area ADIZ. By the time ATC cleared him in, the aircraft ran out of gas and the aircraft landed deadstick in a field and collided with trees...

I leveled at 11,000 feet as Santa Fe slid beneath the left wing. Turning southeast onto the airway that runs the pass between the San Juan de Cristos to the north and the Sandias to the south, I set the Bellanca Super Viking's power and tweaked the trim for cruise. Reaching to the floorboards I moved the fuel selector to the AUX position, for auxiliary-tank fuel placarded "for use in level flight only." "Level off checklist complete," I spoke to myself after completing the level-off "flow pattern." But then...

For most of us, if our engine quits, we're going down. It happens, though not often. About half the time, it's either because a pilot exhausted his fuel, starved the engine by attempting flight with a tank that had none left, or forgot about that red knob. An additional fourth or so are attributable to maintenance issues. And about another ten percent are attributable to fuel contamination. These data come only from those events in which a forced landing resulted in an "NTSB 830 classifiable accident" but based on these, a forced landing occurs about once every 200,000 hours: many times more than most of us will ever get to fly.

We have covered a lot of ground on the fueling of airplanes lately, but you can imagine our surprise when we heard a new risk to fueling aircraft. That risk allegedly comes from that ubiquitous communication device of the 90's, the cell phone. It seems that someone wants us to think that these little boxes, designed to allow us to communicate between each other whenever we want to, from wherever we happen to be, can really put some excitement into fueling your aircraft or any other vehicle.

Anyone who has ever caught themselves flying while getting uncomfortably close to the big "E" will appreciate the following irony, and its potential lesson: Just when you think you've got the advantage, when you're holding all the cards, one could turn out to be a Joker.

Here's a story you don't hear very often. It is a tale of a hard IFR flight, and a chance encounter with a thunderstorm in a twin engine Cessna 421. The results of the encounter would challenge any pilot, and in most cases, would have cost a lot more...