By Chris Nugent   January was a busy month for the Scholarship Committee. Thanks to your support we were able to award a total of 13 of scholarships for the 2023 academic year – a record for our program. We’ve been busy working with the colleges and flight schools our recipients are attending to ensure their scholarship funding is in place for their spring semester
By Chris Nugent   We had another great turnout for the 2022 scholarship cycle with forty-three applications received. The overall quality of the scholarship applications has always been impressive, and the 2022 submissions were no exception. In past years, the career objectives for the majority of the applicant’s focused on becoming professional aviators. However
  By Howard Deevers   Many of us that have been flying for a long enough time can remember when there were Flight Service Stations located all over the country. Most were at airports, and you could just walk in, fill out a flight plan, get a briefing in person, and be on your way. Oh, the “good old days.” I had flown from Pittsburgh to Dallas in a Mooney M20J
By Chris Nugent   November is typically a busy month for the Scholarship Committee as we focus on evaluating this year’s scholarship applications. As I mentioned last month, we received forty-three applications for the 2022 application cycle, so this past month was no different. The review process is made that much more difficult based on upward trend in the
  By Howard Deevers   On a recent Private Pilot check ride, the examiner asked the student pilot, “How do you turn on your ELT?” The student struggled to answer that question, since there was no remote switch for the ELT in the plane used for the check ride. The question came during the flight portion of the test, and not during the oral part of the
By Chris Nugent   October has been an exciting month for the APA Scholarship program! We closed the 2021 APA scholarship cycle at the end of October and had another great turnout for the program with 43 applications being submitted. This is about the same number submitted in 2021 (42 applications) but still up significantly from the 29 we received in 2020 and 24
BarbaraHarper  By Barbara Harper and Howard Deevers   The words safe and safety have not been used for long in industry as we find them used today. Now the words seem overused, or sometimes even mis-used. It seems that you can’t buy any product that does not come with some kind of “safety” warning on the label or printed on a paper that’s included with the
By Chris Nugent   September was a busy month for the Scholarship Committee with schools back in session and the scholarship application deadline fast approaching at the end of October. We were fortunate enough to be able to hold eleven in-person information sessions at University of North Dakota (UND), Chandler-Gilbert Community College (CGCC) and the East Valley
  By Howard Deevers   After a student pilot has had a few lessons and begins to understand the airplane, systems, and physical laws of flying, I like to ask a question: What is the most important item on this airplane? The student will usually think about all of the instruments, radios, wings, engine management and give me an impressive list of items: “The
  By Howard Deevers   The opinions express here are the authors only, and may not reflect those of APA, or any other aviation organization. On our very first flying lesson, we were taught to do a “Pre Flight Inspection.” Or, at least we should have been taught that. I don't remember anything resembling a Pre-Flight on my first three flying lessons. Is it because