Flight Training

Premature cylinder problems are epidemic. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t hear or read about an aircraft owner having to pull one or several cylinders at annual due to poor compression with leakage past the exhaust valve. More often than not, the afflicted airplane is powered by a fuel-injected TCM engine. The cause […]

One of the hardest parts of flying instruments is making the transition from on-the-gauges to visual flight at the missed approach point. Visual and instrument pilots also have difficulty at times landing in the proper touchdown zone because they’re too fast or too slow on final. One way to make safe, consistent landings, and to […]

This article appeared in Light Plane Maintenance, Oct. 2008. The most important reason to have a multi-probe engine-diagnostic system is the in-flight diagnostic capability that such a system brings. If the pilot knows and understands the system, a multi-probe cylinder head temperature/exhaust gas temperature (CHT/EGT) system can serve as an unparalleled “early warning” device, pinpointing […]

This article originally appeared in IFR Refresher, Oct. 2007. Aviation magazines that talk to instrument pilots seem to focus on the importance of currency as the critical element of a safe flight in the clouds. Here’s a look at some of the building blocks to currency and what happens when they’re ignored. Loss of Scanning […]

If a nonpilot asks you “How do you take off?” how would you answer? Line up with the runway, add power, accelerate to liftoff speed, raise the nose and go. But is it really as simple as that? Every year airplanes fail to get off wet or muddy runways, or to clear obstacles past the […]

This article originally appeared in IFR magazine, Mar. 2006. There is a chain of FBOs in the Midwest famous for warm cookies, parrots with rude vocabulary and impressive line ladies. The ramp full of airplanes indicates that pilots are attracted to, and distracted from, competing FBOs by these interesting things. Looking in the cockpit of […]

Of the many tasks that we have to perform as pilots, leaning the engine is one of the simplest. Leaning is vastly easier than shooting a circling approach in low IMC, picking the smoothest route through a cold front or deciding when to overhaul the engine. Yet no subject I know seems to trigger more […]

This article originally appeared in Aviation Safety, Aug. 2007. Unless you’re someone like Sean Tucker or Patty Wagstaff, or one of the Blue Angels, you probably spend most of your time in the left seat of an airplane flying it straight and level. I know I do, since I’m usually going somewhere, even if it’s […]

This article originally appeared in IFR Refresher, July 2006. Throughout more than 8000 hours and 20 years of flying, I have, like most of us, had numerous opportunities to scare myself and marvel at my own incompetence.Flying — and especially instrument flying — is such a complex endeavor that, given enough time, it’s inevitable that […]

The Wright Brothers were successful because they combined two vital elements of airplane design: control and stability. Wilbur and Orville achieved control through a pioneering design that evolved into what’s used in almost all fixed-wing aircraft today — a system that makes use of the stability designed into the airplane. Controllability cannot exist without some […]