Editor’s Log

Recently I was level at 9,000 feet, hand flying through moderate turbulence, when the GPS in the panel decided to give up the ghost. No warnings, no flags, it just went black.

I was on an airway at the time and had the VORs tuned, so there was no navigational problem, but the GPS conveniently gives an instant answer when the voice from the back asks, How much longer? As I looked over to troubleshoot the unit, I got too engrossed in following the error messages the Apollo was spitting out on rebooting it. When I looked back at the instruments, I was banked 30 degrees and had just begun an 800 fpm descent.

With the turbulence, I didnt want to turn control over to the autopilot, so the…

In ancient Greek theater, playwrights used a mechanism called deus ex machina – god from the machine – to lower an actor to the stage like a god descending from the heavens to right whatever wrong was happening onstage and return order to the universe.

Divine intervention may have worked on theatergoers thousands of years ago in Greece, but it doesnt do diddly in aviation. Unfortunately, too many pilots rely on blind luck to save their skin.

Reading the NTSB accident reports month after month shows that boneheaded pilots are not in short supply. Their ill-conceived maneuvers generally fall into predictable patterns, with the occasional creative individual who finds some new way to har…

Recently when closing out a logbook and starting a new one, I wandered back through the remarks column to see what memories might come forth. I was surprised, however, when it turned out that the majority of my most memorable flights had nothing in that column, or the remarks were limited to instrument approach flown or some other flight minutia.

The reason, of course, was because the flights that stand out most vividly usually involve something I dont really want to reduce to writing. Yeah, these are the flights where you drive away from the airport with the unsettling feeling that youve just dodged disaster.

Its interesting how those disasters evolve as the years pass and the ho…

July 1999 will have a bit of infamy in the aviation world for years to come. Not only did New York (and the rest of us) lose JFK Jr. to a light plane accident, National Air and Space Museum chief Donald Engen died when the motorized glider in which he was riding suffered an in-flight breakup.

Of course, popular media managed to present startlingly inaccurate information to the general public about the safety of light plane flying, especially in its round-the-clock coverage of the search for Kennedy and his passengers. The misconceptions born out of that coverage are bound to stay with us long after the average American forgets what VFR means. Many people stubbornly concluded what theyd a…

Apilot friend of mine is one of the most knowledgeable people I know when it comes to IFR flight and regulations. He has the FARs cold and knows the information in the AIM better than some people know their birth certificate. He flies VFR whenever he can.

Another pilot I know has to look things up occasionally. He admits to a certain befuddlement about some of the rules and, deep down, I suspect hes a little leery of shooting approaches when the weather is at minimums. He files an IFR flight plan in the clearest weather and accepts non-direct routings as the price he must pay to be solidly in the system.

Both guys are good pilots. They both have good stick and rudder skills, use the…

Unless youre really behind in your reading, the clock should still be ticking down to Y2K. Even if the new year has already begun, its not too late to make some resolutions about how youll approach flying, your airplane and your peers in the coming year.

Resolutions, of course, are only worthwhile if you plan on keeping them, so think about the kind of flying you do and the ways you think you can improve. Any pilot, from student to veteran ATP, should be able to come up with a few. If not, theyre not nearly as good as they think they are.

For my part, here are an even dozen flying resolutions Im planning to observe in the new millennium. I have a few others, but I dont think they…

The discussion started out being is a twin better than a single. But soon it was branching into the philosophical questions of how much more does it take to make something better, when is more less, and can you really afford more anyway?

Die-hard twin pilots smugly point to the capabilities of their machines and say its no contest. The pilots of singles like to say that the second engine does little but lift its own fuel and fall back on old jokes about the second engine only being there to take you to the scene of the crash.

But twins do cost more to operate than a roughly comparable single, and since most general aviation pilots vote with their checkbooks, the popularity conte…

Recently I strapped into the company Lance for the semi-annual Instrument Proficiency Check, which I take every six months regardless of my perceived proficiency or legal currency. For more than two hours, flight instructor extraordinaire Steve Brady had me put the airplane through its paces while he put my brain through paces of its own.

He kept looking for chinks in the armor, while I was determined to show as few as possible.

Steve is one of those flight instructors who knows that his job is more than pencil-whipping a log book. He probes for weaknesses and, once he finds them, assaults them mercilessly. As a consequence, flying with him is always demanding, exhausting and extremely…

Pilot 1 is doing a run-up and notices an excessive mag drop on one side. He runs it up to nearly full power briefly and the engine smoothes out and the mag drops become equal and normal. He takes off and makes an uneventful flight. When he returns, he tells Pilot 2 of the problem and the solution.

The next day, Pilot 2 is doing a run-up on the same airplane. He notices an excessive mag drop on one side, and recalls Pilot 1s solution. Recalling that full power solved the problem for Pilot 1, he takes the runway and advances the power to full. The plane takes off as usual, but the com radios are filled with ignition noise. At an intermediate destination, a mag check shows equal drops that…

Go ahead. Make an instructors day. Volumes have been written about the state of flight instruction. Veteran pilots sometimes chafe at the notion of paying some kid barely out of puberty to approve them for instrument flight for another six months or, worse yet, sign off on their ability to fly at all for another two years. New pilots wonder what theyre getting when their instructor clocks in with a minimum of experience.

The notions get worse as even those instructors vanish in a few months – snapped up for a lousy job by a tiny commuter airline and replaced by someone even younger and with even less experience. Their most redeeming quality is that theyre cheap to hire.

Then there a…