Features

Straight and level can be boring, there’s no question about it. Occasionally racking over into a steep bank, or performing the commercial-certificate maneuvers when you don’t have to, are among the ways non-aerobatic pilots can relieve some of the monotony of using an airplane for transportation. For some, it’s all about showing off. Others may just want to challenge themselves, perhaps to see if they can still perform as they did on their checkride. And most of the time, that’s okay—a steep turn or max-performance maneuver every now and then usually won’t have an adverse consequence, presuming the airplane’s limitations are respected.

Of all the major components of a conventional airplane, the tail—empennage, if you prefer—may be the least understood. Yes, we generally know it’s there to help balance and stabilize the airplane’s attitude in flight, and to help control yaw and pitch, but that’s often the extent to which we paid attention in ground school. If we were paying more attention, we might have learned airplane tails come in many different shapes and sizes, and can be placed at either end of the airplane. They can be partially or totally omitted from some airplanes, while others might be considered to have more than one.

Very few airplanes get precisely “book” performance. Some do better, some don’t quite meet the specs. Meanwhile, common piloting techniques differ from those recommended by the pilot’s operating handbook (POH) or airplane flight manual (AFM). It’s up to you to determine what is “normal” for your airplane, and the way you fly it. To learn what even a type-certificated airplane will truly do and when, you need to test-fly the airplane. For a time, I was the lead instructor for Beechcraft Bonanza training for an international flight safety organization working at the Beech factory airport. Part of the training we provided included flight in the customer’s airplane. One of the items on the flight training syllabus was to show different flying techniques, and compare actual performance received to that predicted by the POH.

As long as you’re not worried about engine failure, the safest altitude is one that keeps you absolutely clear of terrain. The FAA has created a whole suite of acronyms to do this: Minimum sector altitude (MSA), minimum obstacle clearance altitude (MOCA), offroute obstacle clearance altitude (OROCA) are some examples. These acronyms and the numbers that go with them are designed to keep you above the rocks.

Maintaining your IFR currency isn’t that hard. Just fly and log in actual or simulated conditions six instrument approaches, “holding procedures and tasks” and “intercepting and tracking” electronic courses within the preceding six months, and you’re golden. Even if you find yourself slightly out of currency in the 11th month, you can go out with a safety pilot and fly the requisite approaches/holds/intercepts, regaining your ability to legally file and fly IFR. But after 12 full months of being out of IFR currency, you’ll need an instrument proficiency check, or IPC. There was a time, before the most recent revisions to FAR 61, when an IPC—previously known as an instrument competency check—wasn’t structured. That’s no longer the case.

The Flick,” the big picture, is how situational awareness often is described. As short descriptions go, it’s a good one. The big picture can mean different things to different people, of course, but it generally breaks down into knowing where you are, where you’re going, what it’s going to take to get there and whether the resources to complete the flight are available. The resources can be any number of things. In particular, they usually boil down to keeping tabs on fuel, weather and terrain. Lose the flick on either one of these three, and you could find yourself in these pages.

The practical test standards (PTS) spell out the requirements for successfully completing an FAA checkride for pilot certificates and ratings. They have been around for nearly 30 years and, while an improvement over the previous flight test guides, they did not fundamentally alter the manner in which the applicant demonstrates compliance with the regulations. The general aviation community and FAA are developing a new concept of airman testing that will be embodied in completely new airman certification standards (ACS). The ACS, when implemented, will require applicants to integrate their knowledge, skills and risk management proficiency to demonstrate to the examiner they can do more than just perform standard training procedures and maneuvers.

No matter how smooth and enjoyable the flight, your passengers always will remember the landing. Anything other than a single, bounce-free touchdown is ripe for comment and, if your passengers also are pilots, ridicule. While a good landing is a combination of many factors, the last chance you have to affect its outcome is in the flare. Whether you’re flaring too high above the runway or too low, at too high an airspeed or too enthusiastically, there’s usually a fix for what ails your landings. A lot of it can come down to how you transition from approaching the runway with the nose down to the ideal nose-up, power-off attitude, inches above the runway. It’s not that hard.

It’s been said—and confirmed, in a conference I attended at the FAA’s Oklahoma City complex a couple of years ago—that you can miss every weather-related question on every FAA Knowledge Test (“written”), from Sport Pilot all the way through and including the ATP, and still pass each test…and ultimately, pass every checkride. Our instructors and aviation periodicals implore us to become students of aviation weather, but only on rare occasions are we actually given the tools we need to make weather-related go/no-go decisions. Certainly one of the most common requests I get from my recurrent flight students is for help in understanding weather well enough to make informed choices that protect their families when they fly. So how can we quickly and methodically sift through page after Internet page of aviation weather data to make informed decisions?

The predominate causes of general aviation accidents aren’t a mystery. Each month in these pages, each year in the AOPA Aviation Safety Institute’s Nall Report and every day at the NTSB, mishaps are reviewed, dissected, catalogued and judged. The depressing thing about this process is the mind-numbing predictability of it all: Over time, some specific proportion of general aviation accidents will be caused by one thing while other causes will have their own percentage. The numbers don’t change that much from month to month, or year to year. It’s frustrating.