The NBAA Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition, known throughout the industry as NBAA-BACE, lands in Las Vegas from October 20 to 22 this year. It is the largest gathering in business aviation, drawing tens of thousands of attendees, every major aircraft manufacturer, and the operators and training providers who keep that fleet flying. It is

Daylight Saving Time ends on Sunday, November 1, 2026, and the effect on a pilot’s schedule is more dramatic than most non-pilots realize. Overnight, sunset moves roughly an hour earlier. A 6 p.m. flight that was comfortably VFR in daylight a week earlier suddenly needs to be planned, and flown, as a night flight. This

World Space Week runs from October 4 to 10 every year, marking the anniversary of Sputnik’s launch in 1957 and the start of the space age. It is easy to file this under space trivia and move on. But there is a training philosophy buried in the history of every space program since Sputnik that

Every fall, the same pattern repeats at general aviation airports across the country. Clear skies at sunset give way to a low, dense fog by early morning, the product of cooling ground temperatures and calm autumn air creating a temperature inversion that traps moisture right at pattern altitude. Pilots who flew comfortably all summer under

On September 18, 1947, the U.S. Air Force became its own branch of the military, separating from the Army Air Forces that had carried American airpower through the Second World War. Seventy-nine years later, the anniversary is a good excuse to ask a practical question instead of just a ceremonial one: what does military flight

Home flight simulation has already changed how people learn to fly, moving procedural fluency out of expensive aircraft hours and onto a desk. The next decade is likely to change something different: who or what sits in the seat next to you while you practice, and how immersive the environment around you becomes. Neither shift

Most advice on building a home cockpit reads like a shopping list: buy this yoke, add these pedals, get this monitor setup. The problem with that approach is that it treats every purchase as equally urgent, when in practice, the order you buy things in matters just as much as what you buy. A phased

For most of flight training’s history, an instructor’s assessment of a student’s progress came down to memory and intuition. How did the last approach look compared to the one before it. Was the radio call smoother this time. Those judgments are valuable, but they are also subjective, and they fade the same way any memory

For most of aviation history, learning to fly required proximity to money, and often to family already in the industry. Aircraft rental, instructor time, and airport access were, and largely still are, expensive. That reality quietly shaped who became a pilot for generations, regardless of who actually had the aptitude for it. What has changed

Most flight hours are, by design, uneventful. A student practices a normal pattern, a stabilized approach, a routine cross country. That is exactly how it should be. But aviation safety has always depended on preparing for the day that is not routine: the engine roughness at altitude, the sudden weather deterioration, the instrument failure at