February Safety Update: Fatigue, “Duty Time”, and the Long Day Trap February 4, 2026 Flying for Angel Flight West (AFW), or any philanthropic flying, is among the most meaningful work a general aviation pilot can do. Volunteer pilots, Earth Angels and all AFW staff and volunteers bring skill and compassion together in service to others. But these missions also introduce a unique set of risks – many of which are subtle, cumulative, and easy to underestimate. Let us examine those risks under th… Safety Officers Read More »
Advantages of Filing IFR for AFW Missions November 7, 2025 Hello AFW Command Pilots, specifically IFR-rated Command Pilots. OK, so I feel bad for all the VFR-only Angel Flight Command Pilots, as this article doesn’t apply to you (unless it encourages you to get your instrument rating!). I don’t fly nearly as many Angel Flight missions as I’d like to, but most of those flights were VFR flights. However, I have recently filed and flown several IFR Angel Flights, regardless of t… Safety Officers Read More »
What is Hard IFR? February 20, 2022 Winter is almost over (but not quite) and the weather is changing. Spring is a time of quickly developing weather systems and unpredictable weather. Not that long ago I sat in my house in the Cascade foothills at 1,800 MSL and watched the effects of the portion of the “bomb cyclone” that passed through our region. We didn’t get it as bad as other places like Northern California but I was looking at hig… Kaitlyn McQuown Read More »
AFW Safety News: Logging Cross-Country Time July 9, 2021 Logging Cross-Country Time It is probably easier to navigate through the fog without instruments than trying to determine how to log cross-country time. How you classify your flight time as cross-country depends upon the context of its use. As the FAA has written before, there are multiple ways to define the logging of cross-country time. First: The FAA defines cross-country ti… Wendy Weisenberg Read More »
