As a newly minted private pilot, Sara Gagné takes her mother on a sunset flight around the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Not expecting any adverse issues during her very first flight with a passenger, Sara finds herself unable to establish radio communication.

NOTE: We realized we omitted a key detail in this episode. When the guest discusses the remedy of shining a phone flashlight against the radio panel to make the display brighter, she is most likely referring to the panel having a faulty light sensor. Some avionics have an auto-dimming feature that uses a light sensor, which adjusts the brightness of the display to coincide with the ambient light level.

We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

Peter Danzig hears a disturbing banging sound while flying his Bonanza A36 near Paso Robles, CA, and decides to make a precautionary landing at a small private airport. After landing, he must contend with less than ideal conditions in which to depart again.

While flying in his Piper Saratoga over the Mark Twain National Forest en route to Northeast Arkansas, Brent Reddick notices a subtle but disturbing drop in RPM, followed by a complete engine failure.

GA pilot Claudia Gibson recalls a flight on a late October night in Indiana, during her student pilot days. While on an extensive night training flight with multiple stops, Claudia and her instructor have an eerie encounter in the form of an unwanted guest on the runway.

While shooting an IFR practice approach in his Twin Comanche, retired Air Canada pilot Marc Arsenault loses electrical power to his landing gear system. After realizing that a manual gear extension will not work, Marc must resort to creative thinking – and the help of a Swiss Army knife – to get the gear down.

On the final leg of a cross-country flight from Mississippi to California, flight test engineer Joey Brown finds himself unable to maintain altitude in his 1967 Cessna 150G.

Climbing through 6,000 feet after departing Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland, pilot and aircraft builder Steve Gross encounters severe icing in his RV-9. With his indicated airspeed falling to 60 knots and his climb rate dropping to zero, Steve must take quick action.

GA pilot Jonathan Fay experiences a laser strike while in the traffic pattern for a night landing. He tells the story of what happened, and how he was able to track down the perpetrator afterward.

On a night flight to Grand Strand Airport in Myrtle Beach, SC, pilot Greg Duckworth experiences an engine failure in his Rutan Long-EZ. With a sea of city lights below, Greg must resort to quick thinking and help from ATC to find a place to land.

AOPA Western Pacific Regional Manager Jared Yoshiki recounts the story of purchasing his first airplane - a Cherokee 180. While ferrying it from Indiana to his home airport in California, things went awry.