System

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.

In-betweens are always tough, and have the potential for trouble. Flying some IFR practice in VFR conditions is a perfect example. Youre emulating one set of rules (IFR) but youre actually bound by another set (VFR). There are all sorts of potential traps here: maintaining cloud clearances, conflicting with traffic youd normally be separated from, and blundering into airspace without the required communication or permission.

The controller is usually a great resource. But sometimes other demands can produce some real challenges.

Ever plan on running an errand on the way home only to arrive home having made no stops? It happens to me all the time. People become conditioned to patterns and trying to do something different leads to mistakes. The same is true when flying. Procedures are developed and implemented to prevent and catch errors. […]

It’s been a pretty smooth flight so far, but out of the haze, you see the emerging outline of a huge towering cumulus. Oh, wonderful—an afternoon thunderstorm in your way. But controllers are primarily concerned with directing aircraft, so a dynamic rainbow of colors on their scope would be a serious distraction. For that reason, […]

We recently had a thought-provoking exchange of e-mails with Henry, a reader who asked a multipart question: What equipment does he need in his airplane for an instrument checkride? Afterward, what equipment does he reasonably need to fly it daily in the system? If an autopilot is installed, its use is expected during the test […]