Search Results for: electric

From a mountain clearing, safely ensconced within a strong and comfortablecabin, a thunderstorm at full throttle is an awesome and beautifulsight. But from a small aircraft in flight, with thunderstormsin all quadrants, the sight loses much of its beauty; and if inIMC with embedded cells, there is no beauty at all.  Thunderstorms are highly developed […]

Monday, August 21st: SMX-BFI A fter topping the tanks of my trusty Cessna 310and packing it with lots of charts, coats, luggage, cameras, and survivalgear, I take off with my brother-in-law Joel for a long-anticipated flyingvacation trip to Alaska. It’s the first time for both of us, and somethingI’ve dreamed about doing for 20 years. […]

I never intended to buy a twin, actually. I was perusing Trade-A-Plane looking for a nice T210 or P210. But you know how it goes…it’s impossible to resist the urge to see what Lear Jets or King Airs or DC-3s are going for. And so it was that I noticed that the market for piston […]

The attitude indicator is the only instrument on the panel that provides a clear picture of the flight attitude of the aircraft. Without it, the pilot must try to piece together a mental picture of flight attitude by integrating information from several other instruments (turn-and-bank or turn coordinator, airspeed indicator,vertical speed indicator, altimeter) that provide […]

When I got my instrument rating in 1967 and my CFII in 1971, skill at flying needle, ball, and airspeed received a lot of emphasis. And with good reason: the other gyro instruments (attitude and heading) were vacuum-driven, and the vacuum systems had the nasty habit of failing without warning. Standby vacuum systems didn’t yet […]

I‘ll never forget the day ATC almost dealt me out. It was Saturday, March 3, 1990. I was the pilot and sole occupant of my Cessna 310. It was the home stretch of an hour-and-a-half IFR flight from Hayward to Santa Monica (both in California). I was tracking southeastbound on V459 at 6000′ assigned, talking […]

It was late Friday afternoon, the first day of our month-long vacation trip to the East Coast. We were somewhere between Albuquerque NM and Dalhart TX, headed for Tulsa, cruising at FL180 to stay above the ice. My wife was fast asleep in the back of our Cessna Turbo 310, bundled tightly in her security […]

Most small aircraft depend on air-driven gyro instruments powered by vacuum produced by an engine-driven air pump. The vacuum system is a simple one, and it should be reliable and trouble-free. Too often, though, it isn’t. Figure 1 shows the vacuum system in a typical single-engine airplane. Ambient air enters the system through a central […]

I‘m not a licensed A& P mechanic, but I play one on TV. Actually, I’m just a maintenance-involved owner who spends quite a bit of time hanging around the shop swinging wrenches on my Cessna 310, and I get to see a lot of other airplanes coming through the shop. I’ve concluded that most light […]