IFR Magazine

Its the summer of 2020, and youre tooling along in your G10,000-equipped bugsmasher, dutifully tracking that magenta line direct to your destination because NextGen allows free flight RNAV-direct navigation. Weve come so far from the days of A/N ranges and dead reckoning.

Judgment is the cornerstone of the air traffic control profession. This basic trait, common among thousands of successful air traffic controllers worldwide, allows controllers to face a variety of situations-including unusual pilot requests-and act appropriately.

ASOS myopically reports conditions when unattended. It won’t spew out random observations, but it can’t be counted on for an accurate and complete picture in all situations. Trained weather observers located at some airports can augment the observation to add these details, such as including showers in the vicinity of the airport (VCSH). But, of […]

Even though glass panels dominate the pages of aviation magazines and seem almost required to get flight training students in the door of a flight school, there are plenty of pilots and aircraft trolling the skies with conventional instruments. Retrofitting electronic flight information systems (EFIS) often exceeds the hull value of the aircraft. Even adding a simple electronic attitude indicator ends up being over $5000 in investment.

There is a lot of talk about the paperless cockpit these days, and some airlines have even embraced the iPad as a replacement for a bag full of charts. I have been committed to this for several years, and the best-integrated, most reliable package I found before Jepp FD was from Anywhere Map, who make a bulletproof product, and recently announced a new, cross-platform product for iPad and Android.

If none of your vast experience involves a major international airport, it is incomplete. There are times when flying into a big airport is just more convenient, such as for a business meeting at the airport hotel or to pick up a passenger arriving by airline. With a little planning and study, you can handle […]

It’s Food Network’s fault. You and your buddies from Jacksonville have a hankering for some Cajun food from New Orleans. Hundred dollar gumbo, here you come. Your Saturday morning flight from Florida’s Atlantic coast to Louisiana traverses two hundred miles of military Special Use Airspace from Tallahassee to Mobile. You file a route inland—KJAX..SZW..MAI..CEW..SJI..KNEW—that takes […]

Recently, an airline began to receive notices that crews flying the RNAV (GPS) RWY 36 approach into Birmingham, Alabama (BHM) were receiving GPWS alerts while descending from the MDA to the runway. Since it wasnt an isolated incident, the airline suspected that the approach was flawed and notified the FAA, who flight checked the approach. The results of that inspection are educational to instrument-flying pilots at all levels.

My instrument instructor was a glass half-full kind of guy. His response to my first ILS was, Well, at least there is room for improvement. An ILS became the one approach I most dreaded. But now that Ive got a bunch of em under my belt, its actually the approach I prefer. Howd I get there? Im glad you asked.

As another year dawns bright on aviations horizon its time to glance back with jaundiced eye at what our fellow pilots have accomplished in the you-wont-believe-this department. Each year we scour the latest NTSB accident/incident reports for which probable cause has been determined and cherry pick those aviators whove made the supreme effort to ding a wing or to go the extra mile on the last whiff of avgas. We seek the best of the worst-the crme de lbuffoons-whove taken pranging airplanes to new lows and survived. Well analyze 2009, but given that we pilots try the same spar-bending antics over and over again, hoping for different results (the very definition of insanity), this could be from any year.