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Almost thirty years ago, my primary CFI gave me my first checkout in an airplane with a constant-speed propeller…a Cessna 182. He repeatedly drilled me on the routine: always retard the throttle before you pull back the prop control; always push in the prop before you advance the throttle; and never NEVER allow the manifold […]

Traditionally, FlightSafety Internationaloffered simulator-based recurrent training only for pilots of piston twins, turboprops and jets. In 1988, however, the company inaugurated a new series of programs for single-engine pilots. FlightSafety now has single-engine simulators for Beech Bonanza 33/35/36, Cessna 210/T210/P210, and Mooney 201/205/231/252/TLS/PFM/MSE. The Beech and Cessna sims are in Wichita, while the Mooney sim […]

In 1986, FlightSafety Internationalconducted a statistical study to compare the accident rates of piston-twin pilots who had trained with FlightSafety to those who had not. This study analyzed US-registered Cessna and Piper piston twin-engine aircraft that were involved in fatal accidents during the years 1983 and 1984. Cessna 337 (centerline-thrust) aircraft were excluded. Out of […]

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 the factory-installed turn-and-slip instrument in my Cessna 310 took a dive some years ago, I decided to replace it with a turn coordinator. It didn’t take me long to discover that I hated it. My biggest gripe with the new TC was that its slip-skid indicator (the ball) was much smaller and mounted much […]

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 […]

In the TRACON version of CA, the process starts with a primary filter which runs through all possible pairs of tracked targets and eliminates those that are more than 40 seconds flying time from one another at their current groundspeeds. The track-pairs that make it through the primary filter are then analyzed by three different […]

Picture this. You’re flying a textbook VOR approach. You’re ahead of the airplane and doing everything right. ATC gave you a perfect radar vector turn-on to the final. Crossing the FAF, you started the timer, dropped the gear, and pulled the power back for a nice steep 1,000 FPM non-precision descent. You’ve committed the MDA […]

“Preferred routes.” Hah! Preferred by whom? Not us general aviation pilots, that’s for darn sure. A lot of the IFR routes that we get from ATC are positively obscene. Either they add 50% to the total trip mileage, or they take us over the most hostile possible terrain with MEAs above the freezing level, or […]