Search Results for: vfr

When Training Isn’t Worth the Risk Another great article, Paul. As I look back at some of my own various instances of close ones, I realize my perspective about them has changed. Soon after the event, I would count myself very lucky, believing that I had just enough skill to apply and a large amount […]

How many of you file your own flight plan? How many of you file VFR flight plans? Of course, airlines have their own operations and dispatch departments who do all the background work and file the flight plans. With most Part 91 and some 135 operators, “Who filed what?” often gets to the person working […]

One of the great joys of flying is a routine flight. I’m not referring to a flight that went as expected, which undeniably is the greatest joy, I’m talking about flying a routine route. If you hop in your plane on a Saturday afternoon to fly to your favorite $100 hamburger location and get a […]

In less than 25 years, the “miracle” of GPS transformed how even the smallest and least expensive aircraft navigates. Thanks to the wide area augmentation system (WAAS) in the U.S. and similar technologies deployed in other countries, GPS is more accurate, more reliable and more repeatable than what came before. If you need proof, look […]

Short Final: I’ll Call You Back Reminds me of a flight out of Anchorage to Palmer VFR. Palmer is on the other side of the USAF base and not far in a fast airplane. I had arrived IFR and this was my first time into ANC. It was a sunny summer day and there was […]

You’re flying along, listening to a controller issue instructions to many aircraft. From one second to the next, you suddenly start hearing a different controller’s voice. You haven’t changed frequencies. They’re seemingly picking up where the first one left off. Controllers are used to hearing voice changes from an aircraft. Many times a day, I’ll […]

If you’re like me, one of the reasons you started flying was to go places. It’s not at all uncommon for the student pilot pounding around the pattern with an instructor to ask for a respite every now and then, perhaps a jaunt to a nearby airport, at the very least for a change of […]

Back in the bad old days of VOR navigation you could find your position by tuning in two different VORs. Each radial from a VOR was a “line of position” from that VOR. Your position could be anywhere on that line. Where the two lines from two different VORs intersected was your location. For accuracy […]

Even before I started taking flying lessons, I was exposed to aviation. Without a formal frame of reference, I absorbed what little I could from other pilots’ stories, reading about flying in books and magazines like this one and, tragically, learning how some of them came to grief. That usually involved poor weather. It took […]

It’s not unheard of to think thunderstorms are only a product of summer weather. Certainly they are more common in warmer months, but wintertime “thundersnows” are common enough that I’ve seen a few. The point is that we can encounter thunderstorms any time of year, not just in the summertime. These days, it’s easy for […]