AOPA Never Again

A sailplane pilot unintentionally transitions to an open cockpit.

"A low time VFR pilot on a long cross-country flys into IMC and learns to appreciate thorough training and helpful controllers..."

A mid-air encounter with a plastic grocery bag initiates a chain of maintenance headaches for a 2001 Cessna Skylane 182T pilot.

"About 50 feet above the runway a large white plastic bag. The prop immediately shredded the bag with seemingly no ill effects. However, at 400 feet, there was the unmistakable smell of burning plastic..."

I was returning to Frederick, Maryland, from Winter Haven, Florida. My Velocity’s Lycoming IO-360 had been unusually hard to start in Winter Haven, almost causing me to miss my IFR departure window. After a quick break and fuel stop in Waycross, Georgia, the Velocity was again very hard to start. Approximately halfway between Waycross and Lumberton, North Carolina, the engine shuddered, and then returned to normal. Scanning the instruments, I found nothing unusual. The engine then began a vibration that was anything but normal...

A Piper Archer pilot finds out that opening a door in-flight is no big deal...until you fly into a cloud...

With the Hawaiian islands as a backdrop, a Beechcraft pilot logs some single-engine time...in a twin...

"Get-there-itis," maintenance issues, and an inaccurate forecast conspire against a cross-country Cessna pilot. "I was a disoriented, low-time VFR pilot in IMC, without a working radio, in Class C airspace, near a large airport. I knew this was often how accident reports began - or ended..."

Inadvertent flight into unreported IMC causes a VFR pilot to reflect on the value of effective flight instruction...

A birdstrike in a 1960 Focke-Wulf P.149D over Palm Beach brings home lessons of "just fly the airplane" and keep everyone calm...

Although it seems ridiculous to an outsider, operating in less than marginal VFR weather is common in the Louisiana oil field. I was in a Cessna 185 amphibian, engine idling, pointed into the 30-plus-knot wind, holding position in the ship channel southeast of New Orleans. Unfortunately, in the chaos that led up to this point, I forgot about the fist-sized hole in the right float...