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ArtfulBlog

Notes from the cockpit and beyond, by Michael Maya Charles.

November 25, 2020 Finally. A Real, Live Artful Flying Audiobook! It's been a very long slog, but we did it: The Artful Flying Audiobook is finally available ONLINE! As with any Artful process, this was a difficult challenge to meet. Initially, I thought: How hard could…

April 1, 2017 Crickets A couple of weeks ago, I presented a safety seminar on two topics: One segment on Single Pilot Resource Management, SRM, and another on Loss of Control, two topics in which we seem to…

January 26, 2017 What do you do with YOUR discomfort? When something is wrong: a safety concern, a poor procedure, you are asked to do something that just isn’t right, and your gut screams, “NO!”, do you speak up? The truth is, not often…

November 20, 2016 Thank you, Bob Hoover! Last week, I attended a wonderful memorial for a recently departed friend, a national treasure, the one and only, Robert A. “Bob” Hoover. There were a couple thousand people gathered in the hangar at Clay…

November 16, 2016 Make Mistakes Your Friend Recently, I delivered myself to a local simulator company to get an Instrument Proficiency Check. The simulator was a Beech 1900, a type I’d never flown before, though I had some distant memory of…

October 13, 2016 NEW & IMPROVED!! If I told you that nothing I say is “new,” would you be inclined to read a magazine, check your emails or simply tune me out? Would you mutter to yourself, “Nothing here for…

October 12, 2016 The Price of Pickles in Peoria We’re not asking the right questions in our flight training. We’re not asking the right questions in our written tests. So why are we feigning surprise when we get the results that we do? Sure,…

October 12, 2016 When The Student is Ready… A while back, I spent the day in a voice workshop with five other people, one of whom was a yoga instructor. Ms. Yogananda was 15 minutes late, apologized only patronizingly to the group…

October 12, 2016 We Never Landed on the Moon Nearly 50 years ago, my mother was convinced that our amazing landing on the moon was entirely fabricated. It was, she surmised, performed on some soundstage in a TV studio, or perhaps acted out in…

October 12, 2016 Why Are We Here? Lately, I've had a few flying clients, all north of 50, and a couple much more "mature" than that, who have set out to learn something very difficult in an aircraft. I greatly admire…