IFR Magazine

Don’t Need ‘em? Delete ‘em.In “Readback” in June, you said that the major airports at the heart of Class B airspace typically only use ILS and visual approaches. Why, then, does the FAA continue to plan, update, certify and flight check all the other approaches to these airports? It must be a considerable cost—in time […]

Who Ya Gonna Call?Your April article on oxygen mentioned that you could only find one company who’d talk to you Well, you didn’t contact Aeromedix. We would have not only responded immediately, we would have told you that the FAA has finally acknowledged that “oxygen is oxygen” and instead of “aviator’s breathing oxygen” the FAA […]

Higher and HigherApparently, airports in China are popping up like weeds. In September’s Quiz, you correctly reported that Qamdo Bamda Airport in Tibet has the longest paved runway in the world. You also pointed out that it is the highest in elevation. But shortly after you published that, Daocheng Yading Airport trumped Qamdo Bamda as […]

Unable VFR On TopJoe Shelton’s “On Top of the World” article in August and the letters about it since have all missed one important point. VFR on Top is just another altitude assignment while on an IFR flight plan. Like any altitude assignment, ATC may or may not grant it to you. Ian Blair Fries, […]

Years ago I was briefly involved in motorcycle road racing. T-shirts with the slogan, Crashing Sucks and a suitable graphic were quite popular. Even then, I thought how appropriate that slogan also was for aviation. Now we find ourselves with back-to-back airliner crashes while landing in visual conditions and Im reminded of just how appropriate that slogan is to aviation. Crashing sucks for all the obvious reasons, but we must also remember that aviation is a…

At my day job flying airliners, I encounter many pilots for whom flying has sadly become a tedious demand, necessary to put bread on the table, and they’d no sooner take the controls of an airplane on a day off than they’d willingly pay more taxes. Many more might occasionally daydream about GA, but families, […]

I just attended the insurance-mandated recurrent training for my C340A that I haven’t flown in years. I made my share of mistakes, most of which the scenarios are designed to uncover. A few of ‘em really made me think about things. And that’s really what IFR flight is all about. Anybody with even modest hand-eye […]

Trust me. I’m painfully aware it’s July already. And that’s really part of the point. I’ve got to fly more often, something I vowed to do at the top of the year. More years ago than I’ll admit in print, I started a project to renovate the instrument panel in my Cessna 340. You see, […]

Drawings like this have been “out there” for years, although I’d not seen one until a contributor recently forwarded one to me. This resonates mostly because the humor stems from a truth that is a disconcertingly sober one. Let’s explore these four forces.

The battle has raged a long time between useful, inexpensive, portable, non-certified devices and panel-mount certified instrumentation. In practice, weve long used non-certified portables for navigation and we havent been falling out of sky in swarms.