Training & Sims

Our main airport has several flight schools and they keep us air traffic controllers quite busy. Its easy to tell when they get a new batch of students-those first radio calls for VFR clearances and eventual taxi and takeoff are usually halting, uncertain affairs, dragging on as students parrot their instructors without truly understanding the lingo. It can be almost as painful for us as for the student.

Clumsy as those first steps may be, the subsequent journey will hopefully lead each student to true proficiency on the radios. Its not an easy road at times, especially once each advances into instrument training. The amount of radio communication and multitasking may be overwhelming at first.

Three days before Christmas in 1994 a Westwind landed in La Verne, Calif., east of Los Angeles, to drop off the mother of brothers who ran In-and-Out Burgers, a popular fast-food chain in California. They had been on a family trip and had their hunting gear on board. The Westwind took off for John Wayne Airport, a short ride south from La Verne. It crashed on short final to Runway 19R, diving vertically into a parking lot near the airport. It exploded and shot off ammunition in all directions. It had encountered a Boeing 757 wake.

I read with interest and obvious necessity for possible future application, your article on hypoxia, Get Your Mask On, in December, 2014.I fly a Malibu Mirage PA 46. Ive had several decompressions in the low 20s that were attributed to squat switch/pressure switch failures. Ive now added another immediate action to pressurization problems:

Even as a kid, I recognized the hyperbole in the old clich about my elders having it tough, walking to school two miles through heavy snow-uphill in both directions. So any time I start down the path of When I was younger… something inside me clicks and I quickly change gears. Until now.

Like the (un?)welcome holiday letter from distant edges of your family, its again time to see how the GA family has fared in our annual Safety-Takes-A-Holiday review. The rules are simple: Applicants need only do something stupid in an aircraft that results in financial harm but no loss of life. Qualifying lapses in aeronautical decision making (ADM) can occur in IMC or VMC, day or night, with or without a valid pilot certificate and in anything that flies-legally or not. Boneheaded stunts must be verified by the NTSB, so were using calamities from 2011, the most recent with NTSB-posted probable cause. No, we dont make this stuff up.

One of the most famous and tragic of fuel-exhaustion crashes occurred on Jan. 25, 1990. Upon arrival in the New York area after a flight from Bogot, the 707 was placed into a hold for an hour and 27 minutes due to fog at JFK. The pilots were not native English speakers and never used the actual word emergency in describing their fuel situation to ATC, using only minimum fuel instead and never stating their fuel state in minutes. During that time, they burned away all the fuel they needed to make Boston, their alternate.

When comparing a high-speed, cruise-power descent against a cruise-speed, reduced-power descent, there are a surprisingly large number of variables in the equation, all pulling in different directions.

Maybe its the looming specter of my 25th high-school reunion thats got me worrying about getting fat and sloppy. Living in the land where donuts and coffee are staple foods, Ive been passing on the former while muttering renewed resolutions about spending more time at the gym.

Those of you who once held paper certificates may remember the ill-fated Advanced Automation System (AAS), one of the worlds most ambitious software projects. Launched in 1981 and terminated in 1994, it cost over $3.7 billion and didnt produce a single piece of software.

On October 20, 2009, some changes to Part 61 became the new gospel from the FAA. These werent huge, sweeping changes, but they were easy to miss and could affect you quite a bit. Lets take a look.