The Reider Report

The crew of an Air National Guard C-130 Hercules was on a nighttime precision cargo drop practice mission. En route, they found themselves significantly lower in altitude than they should have been, putting their lives in jeopardy. What happened caused some changes in procedures and how missions were flown to that drop zone. Brigadier General Marcus Jannitto, the navigator on that flight, joins Rob Reider to explain the en...

Analytics - it’s an important word in almost every business. The same is true in aviation. On today’s episode, Rob Reider talks with Dr. Paul Craig, PhD, who shares some of the not-so-flattering statistics for pilots who have between 50 and 350 hours of flight time. He’s compiled thousands of accident reports and published his findings in a book called, “The Killing Zone.” He’ll also discuss his personal incident when he w...

Air Traffic Control in the USA is an extremely challenging job for the men and women who help manage nearly 50,000 flights daily in the U.S. alone. In the busiest airports, coordinating departures begins before any airliner pushes back from the gate. Joining host Rob Reider is retired JFK controller Dave Schoen, and he gives us a glimpse into the workings of ATC and how we as pilots can do our parts to keep it moving smoot...

How many times have we jumped in an airplane for a short flight without doing complete flight planning? Most of the time there are no consequences. But what would you do if you thought you’d done due diligence in your planning and something changed en route? Divert? Go back to where you started? Or was there another option? Host Rob Reider discusses this cautionary tale with pilot Randy Bolinger.

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Getting “behind the airplane” is something no one wants to do. But when flight conditions change unexpectedly a pilot’s workload increases, sometimes to the point of being in danger. Today’s guest got into a such a situation when, in IMC, he was given vectors for an approach he didn’t have time to prepare for. FAA Master Pilot Award recipient Tim Delaney describes how he got behind the airplane on an instrument flight to S...

Learning aerobatics imposes forces on the human body that are not familiar. And it requires some changes in how the airplane is handled. For instance, unless we’re intentionally slipping the airplane, we’re taught to “stay coordinated” and “keep the ball centered.” For one pilot, his method of keeping the ball centered during an aerobatic maneuver left him in a very unusual attitude — in a Stearman! How he recovered and wh...

Today we learn some important lessons that affect every pilot on every mission flown, no matter how experienced that pilot is. Do we “push the envelope” on a flight because of familiarity, because we got through marginal weather before, or do we assess each flight thoroughly? A relatively short flight became dangerous because the pilot had “been there, done that.” But it got him in an icy situation. Gene Benson from Vector...