Training & Sims

About a year ago, my wife bought several economical replacement knockoff chargers for her employees Mac laptops, the cords of which their cats had found delicious. They charged very slowly, yet seemed to run extremely hot. Within a month these chargers had all failed with an ominous brown patch on the side from overheating.

Youre on a straight-in visual. Although theres not a cloud in the sky, you loaded the ILS for situational awareness. Its early evening and the sun is blinding any attempt to look out the window. You transition to the gauges and fly the approach, intercepting the glideslope and keeping the crosshairs centered. You finally see the runway and land. The FAA has said we may log an instrument approach if we are in actual or simulated conditions inside the final approach fix. Were you?

Shortly after getting my Cessna 340, one afternoon I was flying an ILS into Modesto, CA, where wed found a temporary home for our airplane. Id recently achieved the heady milestone of 1000 hours total time and a whopping 100 hours of multi-engine time. Plus, Id just gotten all my Is (CFI, CFII, MEI), so, of course, I was truly a great pilot. Id then gotten my initial training (ground and sim) in the 340, finished off with 25 hours with an experienced Twin Cessna instructor pilot. Humility wasnt in my self-image that afternoon. By evening, it had returned with a vengeance.

Call it the familiarity trap. When planning a new route or destination, you carefully examine the charts, procedures, airport diagrams, and approach minimums. But you tend to skip a lot of these steps on well-worn routes and at your home drome. Its near-certain that youll eventually discover how this complacency can be a big gotcha.

Flying with a professional copilot spoiled me. Just calling for a checklist and having it spoon fed to me with no effort or distraction is as good as it gets. So, when I resumed flying GA-no copilot-I hunted for the perfect checklist app. I didnt find it. Until now.

Reader David Novelli asked an innocent but probing question. His primary airport has an approach that says if the local altimeter setting is unavailable you should use one from a nearby field and adjust the minimums. Weve all seen that, although few of us have actually had to take advantage of it.

For years Ive promoted the notion of a lazy pilot-one whos too lazy to do it wrong and then waste time making it right. Lazy pilots do the right thing the right way the first time.

Along with legions of other pilots, I learned to fly in Cessna Skyhawks, with six-pack instrument panels. Even when I moved on up to the 21st century and Garmin G1000-equipped 172SPs, the core aircraft remained familiar-similar V speeds, control yoke, nose wheel steering, big trim wheel. There was a comfort in the sameness.

It was once believed that all swans were white. No one considered the possibility of black swans until a Dutch explorer discovered them in Australia in 1697. That is the nature of a Black Swan event: Its rare, has an extreme impact and is predictable in retrospect.

Instrument approaches are designed such that several divergent paths and procedures funnel into one of a few common designs. Almost every approach you fly will either be a cone of narrowing vertical and lateral guidance; or a staircase of stepdowns to a minimum altitude.