Flight Training

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 […]

This article originally appeared in Aviation Safety, Nov. 2005. Things have progressed quite a bit since Garmin International first released its certificated version of the G1000 in the Cessna C182T Skylane. Garmin was certainly not the first to come up with a glass-cockpit display for general aviation — Avidyne’s Entegra/Flightmax EX5000 holds that distinction — […]

This article originally appeared in IFR magazine, Oct. 2005. Circling at your home airport isn’t that tough. Familiar landmarks help establish proper lateral spacing from the runway. Because you know the landmarks well, you can pick them out from circling altitudes and in low visibility.Circling to an unfamiliar field in challenging conditions is another story. […]

[Editor’s Note: Recently two flight instructors wrote a book on how to use Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX) to enhance pilot training and to provide sim-only pilots a guide to making their flying more realistic. AVweb is reprinting several chapters from this book, the first of which was Chapter 13 — Weather. To download the […]

This article originally appeared in Aviation Consumer magazine, Nov. 2005. However unpleasant the specter of $4 avgas may be, it has become a harsh reality. The $5 barrier fell in early 2005, and as we go to press, Signature at Teterboro, N.J., can claim the highest avgas price in the country: $6.10. [Editor’s Note: At […]