IFR Magazine

Kennedy Ground (Local) is always entertaining to me, with New Yorker attitude and accent from the controllers crossed with the culture and accent of the foreign carriers. Eastern European and Asian carriers are often the most entertaining-make that schadenfreude-including this one:Ground: Malev Sixty-Seven, whats your gate tonight?Malev 67: (Ten seconds of barely intelligible faking of a response.)Ground (after a pause): Malev Sixty-Seven, my earlier transmission was a queeeesssstion … …

Can I Just Breath Air?Thanks for your excellent article on aircraft oxygen systems in April. It is a common misconception that these systems deliver air. Although your article correctly referred to oxygen, people often ask, “Can’t I just breathe the air from my scuba tank? It costs a lot less to fill, and I already […]

Where’s the Runway?In December’s Readback, reader Mark Spencer asked about localizer offsets. In the answer, you said the offset value is not published for LDA approaches. That’s true for now. However a change to policy for the FAA will require charting the amount of offset for any ILS, LOC, MLS, LDA, LDA w/GS, RNP, LPV, […]

The Ol’ Switcheroo, V2In the October issue, “The Ol’ Switcheroo” letter and your response discuss flying an approach to one well served airport, then “hopping over” to another airport lacking sufficient approaches. Portland, Oregon is mentioned as one place that can work well. I want to caution you that the airspace around PDX all ends […]

Stepdowns On the GPS?Early on I learned that sinking below a critical altitude is one of the most difficult errors for me to correct. This has often left me wondering why altitude guidance from GPS navigators is so minimal. With WAAS it knows my altitude often better than my altimeter, and it can warn me […]

Thank you for reminding us in Deadly Disorientation (November IFR) that by far the most dangerous part of a day spent flying is not the drive to the airport, but GA flying itself. You said, it regularly kills between one half and one percent of its participants… The public must know this because so many of them are afraid of small planes. Perhaps we pilots should pay closer attention?

Frank Bowlin may have a misunderstanding of how the CDI needle works while the HSI is using LOC signals.

I second Bob Keepings frustration with Jepp FD (Tales of iPad Mischief, September 2012 IFR). Im mostly a weekend pilot and dont use all the features he does, but Ive experienced the screen pinch problem for at least six months now. Most of the time it rendered FD unusable for en route operations, so I also installed ForeFlight and learned to live with NACO en route charts.

When More is Less“Searching the Sky” in the July issue was a phenomenal article. The cascading failures of this new technology are not well understood. With my G600, a pitot-static glitch, which in the good old days would have caused a barely-noticeable blip on my round VSI or ASI, now throws my ADC into re-compute […]

Recently during an approach to an uncontrolled airport, I asked the Approach controller for a telephone number I could use to contact Approach directly if necessary after landing to cancel the IFR clearance. I am the chief instructor at a busy 141 flight school. I have been flying for over 40 years. I get a […]