Training & Sims

I remember a few years ago I watched my captain try vainly to intercept the localizer. He had a good intercept angle, but the needle just wouldnt come in. Interestingly enough, though, my HSI showed a completely different-and more reasonable-picture.

For those of you who havent been following our little IFR soap opera with Lockheed Martin over Flight Service, heres the nutshell summary: We visited the under-construction Virginia hub of LMs Flight Service in 2006. It looked promising. We looked again in 2008 after the program fell on its face and was working to resurrect itself.

Having flown with right-seaters who possess no more pilot credentials than having a pulse, I can attest that a brief interview with the co-pilot candidate and few minutes of chatting and playing with buttons in the cockpit can turn dead weight into useful load.

Common wisdom in the computer world seems to be that if youre not adding features at breakneck speed, youre falling off the trailing edge into oblivion. We dont subscribe to that thinking; a good program doesnt need constant improvement to be a best tool.

If theres one system that breeds overconfidence in the neophyte, its ice protection gear. Ice in the forecast? Youve got that known-ice Turbo Bugsmasher tucked away in a hangar just for such occasions. Problem solved, right? Not so fast.

I recently endured the annual torment known as recurrent training for FAA FASTeam Rep status. The process is just a minor torment: two 45-minute, pre-recorded sessions of narrated PowerPoint with quizzes at the end. Its the kind of training thats more a checkbox on some bureaucratic tally sheet than any effective means of teaching.

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 […]

The physical world is full of inverse proportions and one I’ve noticed is that when winter temperatures dip to, say, 20 degrees, my northern friends are four times more likely to bitterly complain that Florida, where I live, is nothing but a mosquito-infested fever swamp; God’s waiting room, if you will. But it’s something else, […]

As a technician, I think of EFIS in terms of failures. While most pilots don’t need to dig deep into system schematics, a little tech savvy can help you recognize and understand the implications of a failed EFIS. It doesn’t matter if it’s a component failure, wiring problem or software glitch—a proper understanding of the […]

Until just recently, the role for most pilots was pilot flying with manual control, occasionally supplemented with autoflight when the workload was high and we needed a helping hand. With the increasing availability of more and more capable systems, that role is changing to one of systems manager or, worse, just systems observer. That’s not […]