Unicom

I read the angry letter Young & In Charge from CFI Ben Wielenga [Unicom, February]. He clearly has a point about the error of stereotyping all young CFIs as lacking certain training qualities, but your editors comments are right on point in indicating the excessive increase in the fatal accident rate while the age and experience of the flight instructors has decreased.

I am a 1000-hour, instrument-rated pilot and former owner of a very nice 1981 Cessna 210. I have read your newsletter for many years and passed archive copies on to two of my younger brothers as they became interested in learning to fly. Unfortunately for my youngest brother Steve, who had approximately 200 hours and an…

I enjoyed reading the article Spinning a Tangled Web by John Lowery [Airmanship, April], however, some of his references to the T-37 spin characteristics and recovery procedures are incorrect. I have over 3000 hours instructor pilot time in the Tweet and Johns interpretation of the spin procedure is one of the little things that frustrated a lot of us IPs in Undergraduate Pilot Training.

Instructor training offered some real student interpretation challenges also, especially from instructor candidates coming from Century series aircraft. The T-37 spin recovery procedure calls for Throttles idle, rudder and ailerons neutral, stick – abruptly apply full AFT and hold, determine d…

As a college physics professor who uses dry ice in class, I want to underscore the danger of putting dry ice in any container that can be sealed. Pat Veillette intimates the danger: …perhaps you have considered placing the dry ice in a tightly sealed container…you have created a pressure vessel…those have inherent risks. The situation gets even worse if you have a fire.

This beats around the bush. It should be emphatically stated that dry ice in any sealed container will create a bomb whose time or force of detonation is not easily predictable.

The container could be a hard plastic ice chest with latching lid! Nor do you need a fire to make the situation worse. A few ounces o…

I had read Richard Taylors article IFR for VFR Pilots [Instrument Check, May] when I encountered the following situation:

Returning to Honolulu from Molokai, the weather was gorgeous, except for a 2,500-foot overcast as we got closer to the Class B airport. It was a Kona day, meaning the winds were coming opposite the normal tradewind direction, and the runways were reversed.

This means the general aviation approach is to runway 22, with the mountains rising behind you on final. I was VFR, and given discretion on altitude plus an early landing clearance. Visibility was over 10 miles under 2,500, but there were rain pockets beyond the airport, which were thick but isolated, and…

As the Airport Director of the DeKalb Peachtree Airport, I must take great umbrage with The Clock Runs Out [Accident Probe, June]. It is apparent and unfortunate that Mr. Ibold either did not read the final NTSB report, or, at the very least, took great literary license in his interpretation of the report.

To intimate the fire response crew did anything wrong is totally without merit.

Because PDK is the second-busiest airport in Georgia, our ARFF crew gets to practice responding to many alerts throughout the year in all types of weather conditions. Responding to this specific alert was almost second nature to them in communicating with the tower and in responding to a staging locat…

I thought Future Flight [Reality Check, July] contained great visions, however, I didnt read anything in the article about spatial disorientation. All the fancy new tools for navigation, weather and etc. still leave the vertigo problem unsolved.

A new advanced instrument panel should have some means of addressing the problem. Maybe an attitude display that has real depth to it, instead of perceived depth.

-Lester Zinser
Via e-mail

The advanced displays typically include large display screens with an artificial ground profile derived from the GPS database. Research shows the design works much better than traditional attitude indicators at enabling the pilot to …