IFR Magazine

The much-heralded promise of GPS/WAAS is ILS-like guidance at nearly every airport without the need for a million dollars worth of ILS equipment. The hero of this effort is the LPV approach-thats localizer performance with vertical guidance for those of you just coming up to speed.

Flow of actions verified by checklist is a common system even in the airline cockpit, but its possibly even more useful in single-pilot IFR. Advantage one is that the flow gets critical tasks done quickly, in an efficient path and with a low error rate. Verification by checklist is to drop that error rate to near zero. But in the real world of rushed approaches or changing plans, a flow means that even if you run out of time to verify, you still probably got it covered.

As pilots or passengers, we fly to go somewhere. That somewhere isnt on an airport ramp, crammed for hours into a stationary airliner. And its not cooling your heels in the runup area with the engine shut down.

On October 20, 2009, some changes to Part 61 became the new gospel from the FAA. These werent huge, sweeping changes, but they were easy to miss and could affect you quite a bit. Lets take a look.

If youve been with us a while, youll recognize our yearly foray into the bent and bizarre culled from a years worth of NTSB accident summaries (all non-fatal, of course). Not all are actually stupid. Some are just plain, er, strange. But all, we think, are worthy of note. Each year offers up those who think too much, those who think too little and those who dont think at all.

Every once in a while we run across something in the summaries that is just plain interesting and worth more than a passing mention. One such was the April 2006 crash of a MQ-9 Predator B unmanned aerial drone near Nogales, Ariz.

Of the nearly 16,000 instrument approach procedures in the U.S., over half are RNAV approaches. Of those, 1884 have LPV minimums. About half of the LPV approaches have been created for non-Part 139 airports (no large air carrier service), so GA aircraft are getting a good deal.

It used to be that newbie, commercial pilots started out in the trial-by-fire world of check-hauling and freight-dogging in piston twins. The pilots that survived (and the majority of them did) understood the realities of single-pilot IFR at a visceral level. Those core skills were the foundation on which airline and jet-charter careers were built.

The FAA has more plans in the works for Part 61, but, as they saw from the over 400 comments to the Notice for Proposed Rulemaking (NRPM), some of this thinking isnt fully cooked. Part of the plan was to provide some relief for flight schools who find it harder and harder to find (and afford to keep) complex trainers on the flight line.

If you operate a turbocharged Continental, you might want to emulate Cape Airs technique for managing speed on the ILS. They set the power and then use drag rather than power changes to control rate of descent. This includes dropping gear to get down to a non-precision approach MDA and then retracting it again for the level-off. Apparently some ex-airline types balk at this at first.