Search Results for: vfr

Seeing The Invisible Operating a commercial hot air balloon operation for two decades, your wind summary is spot on. Wind is the engine, directional control or brake for a lighter-than-air (LTA) aircraft and its through understanding critical to safe operations. We use all the elements mentioned in maneuvering a LTA and its understanding critical when […]

New Research Suggests There’s Still A Lot To Learn From Birds Or… pilots could learn best landing techniques and practice accordingly, enhancing safety in that manner rather than adding complexity to the hardware. Though I do agree, there is a lot to be learned from birds, such as how to stay up all afternoon making […]

Believe it or not, air traffic controllers don’t issue radar vectors for amusement. I know it might seem like it when you’re getting strung out for a sequence or for traffic, watching the time-equals-money clock ticking away, increasing the costs of your flight. My goal as a controller is to get you on your own […]

My Fleeting But Memorable Fling With The AN-225 My then-young son Peter and I were attending the Paris Air Show in 1989. We were walking down a fence line in the parking lot abutting runway 03. It was a plane spotter’s paradise. Everything on short final was passing overhead and touching down a few dozen […]

Radar, whether we’re talking air traffic control, thunderstorm detection, navigation, or even air combat, is a technology that has shaped the history of flight in countless ways. The word “radar” is an acronym (RAdio Detection And Ranging) and was coined in 1939 by the United States Army Signal Corps as it worked on these systems […]

A VFR Saturday morning this past December was a good time to exercise my Mooney 201. I decided to visit York, Pennsylvania, (KTHV) since it was close to my home base and I never had the pleasure of visiting there before. About 10 miles out I made my first call. Me: “York, Mooney 10 miles […]

Updated Airport Design Guidance Includes Turf Ops I have 31″ Alaskan Bushwheels on my Maule MX-7-180 so I land on grass whenever possible. They cost $1,800 each and wear out faster when operated on pavement. Many GA airports have a grass strip beside the hard surfaced runway but the condition varies widely. Some have obstacles […]

Sequences don’t come much easier. A VFR Mooney and a VFR Cherokee both requested a practice RNAV approach. They were the same distance from the same initial approach fix (IAF), and the Mooney was 50 knots faster than the Cherokee. I gave the Mooney direct to the IAF. The slower Cherokee got a few vectors […]

Alsim announced on Thursday that its AL40 simulator has been approved by the FAA as an Advanced Aviation Training Device (AATD). Designed as an exact replica of the Diamond DA40 NG, the AL40 comes equipped with G1000 NXi avionics and a GFC 700 autopilot. It uses Alsim’s in-house VFR image generator and visual system with […]

One sunny afternoon in late Fall, several flight school Skyhawks and a Piper Seminole trainer were making the most of the beautiful VFR day by practicing maneuvers in the “Northeast Practice Area.” All these aircraft were self‑reporting their position and intentions on 122.75 MHz. Heard on frequency: Seminole (Student): “Northeast Practice, Seminole 123 over Carnation, […]