Features

You may see it coming, a boiling black cloud looming in your windshield. Others will have pinned you in on either side, making penetration likely.

More likely you will not. Youll be in the clouds and pick up a little turbulence. Then a little more. Then the rain starts. It may be torrential, but you hang on, thinking itll soon be over. The sudden flash of lightning and instant crack of thunder suddenly slam you with the reality that youve gone and done something stupid.

Youve flown into a thunderstorm. Hang on, the ride is going to get wild.Tales of airplanes being ripped apart by thunderstorms are held up time and again by instructors warning the unwary against thunderstorm penet…

Visual perception starts with a complex image analysis done by neurons in the eye. That data is sent to the brain, which interprets information from the eyes by using information gained from prior experience (and some fancy processing tricks). Unlike a photograph, where what you see is what you get, real life visual perception hinges largely on things that are inferred.

Consequently, you can be fooled fairly easily when you place yourself in environments and circumstances that violate the visual rules that you learned through prior experience. Sometimes the fooling around can be fun, as with textbook optical illusions. Other times however, vision can fool you into a tragic mistake.

A…

Pilots and even aircraft owners have a tendency to take airplanes at face value. If a friend or acquaintance asks you to go flying, do you ask to see the maintenance logs, check the applicable ADs, or even tag along on the preflight?

The fact is that the FARs put the onus on the airplane owner to maintain the aircraft in an airworthy condition, and most people trust that the rules have been followed. And when someone asks you to go flying with them, odds are you accept that persons piloting skills as a given without even asking a few simple questions.

The last flight of an Aero Commander 500-B shows just how misplaced that trust can be. The aircraft was being positioned from Lancaster…

General aviation airplanes are great business tools that improve our efficiency by allowing us to do more work that is productive in the same total time. However, a self-piloted businessperson – primarily an instrument-rated private or commercial pilot who flies him/herself in a high performance single or light twin on business trips – can end up in trouble if they dont use that tool correctly.

Perhaps the most common problem experienced by the self-piloted business flier is fatigue. The flexibility of the GA airplane tempts them into scheduling themselves into situations in which they cannot get adequate rest before flying.

How About This…
Lets say you have a 10:00 a….

Avionics manufacturers have a GPS navigator for every purpose and budget. At this springs Aircraft Electronics Association show in Atlanta, yet more models were announced, overhanging the market with unprecedented choices for owners.

GPS sales are clearly hot, but only a small percentage of the GA fleet is equipped with certified GPS. Our best estimate is not greater than 10 percent have IFR navigators.

Many owners are fence sitters still skeptical about the value of spending six grand or more for an IFR navigator that seems to perform only a bit better than a 10-year-old loran. The reasons are many: the cost of admission, lack of utility, beefs about operating complexity and worries…

In 1991, my need for an airplane larger than my Cessna 150 led to a search that ended with a 1959 Cessna 172 my A&P father located near his home in Texas.

The plane obviously needed some cosmetic work, but it fit my meager budget and I was promised it would be sold with a fresh annual inspection. The annual inspection sealed the deal. I figured it would at least be safe to fly in spite of its dowdy appearance, which Id deal with as resources allowed.

My father took care of completing the sale and flew the 172 the 15 or so minutes to his home airport. On landing, he got the first of a whole string of surprises the airplane would reveal in the coming months.

At touchdown on the shor…

Success at a social function is judged by your entrance. If you stumble over the doorstep and land face first in the guacamole, youll definitely get noticed but probably not invited back.

Entering a traffic pattern requires the same dont-trip-over-your-joystick finesse. Unfortunately, there is no Emily Post guide for pattern etiquette, and it shows. Monitor the Unicom at any busy uncontrolled airport and youll hear pilots announcing modified downwinds (with no hint of what that modification is), the cursing that results from one pilot cutting another one off and multiple runways in use, even if theres only one strip of pavement.

Think its not a problem? Look at this issues Pre…

Some flights just dont seem to go right. Your tongue turns to mush when you key the mic. You keep chasing altitude and cant quite get the trim set right. Your dyslexia acts up every time you read back a frequency.

Training and attitude help keep the bad flights away and hold the mistakes to a minimum, but recent experience – the mark of a proficient pilot – may be the single biggest determinant of how easily you can keep misfortune at bay.

Recent experience means more than just how many hours youve logged lately. To be truly proficient, you have to revisit your operating handbook from time to time to review critical speeds and procedures. Check the weight and balance occasionally, e…

Most pilots know that one of the major causes of fatal accidents in light aircraft is continued VFR flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC). But many are surprised that more than one quarter of those accidents involve instrument-rated pilots, according to the AOPA Air Safety Foundation. You might think that the idea of an instrument-rated pilot dying in a VFR into IMC accident is oxymoronic. Unfortunately, youd only be half right.

So why is it that pilots who are qualified and current to fly in the goo turn themselves into smoking holes trying to scud-run through less-than-marginal weather? There are several factors at work here, including attitude, lack of foresight,…

Safety is simple. Use the right tool, the right person and the right procedures for the job. In well-maintained certified airplanes the right tool is usually there. The pilot presumably has been trained to fly the airplane and navigate competently.

Sometimes, however, the third leg of the safety stool is missing. The right procedures for most operations and even some emergencies are specified in the aircraft manual, but sometimes pilots arent familiar with the proper procedures, or sometimes they use procedures from other aircraft or other sources that arent proper for the aircraft and environment in which theyre flying.

Failure to use the proper procedures is an important finding i…