Pilot Proficiency

I was flying with a particularly weak student doing off-airport operations. We were combining high-altitude ops with a pinnacle approach to Pleasants Peak, at 4007 MSL. I wanted this student to call SoCal Approach for a brief bit of flight following to the mountain. I told my student exactly what to say to SoCal. SoCal Approach, this is helicopter 8490D, 5 south of Pleasants Peak for flight following at 4000 feet.

In an era of satellite-based precision approaches, a pilot’s understanding of how to find the destination airport using a nondirectional beacon might seem a waste of time. But in the United States, hundreds of NDBs remain in service, according to the FAA. Alaska alone has 70. Flying an NDB approach requires considerably more pilot attention because […]

The first GPS I used in the air was a Garmin 95 portable. Brick-shaped and nearly brick-sized, its etch-a-sketch screen was a still a revelation. We could go direct to airway fixes and watch the little black pixels approach just as the CDI needles swung to center. This was back when we taught instrument students how to eyeball a course direct to a fix defined by two VOR radials.

Shakespeare elegantly downplays the importance of naming in Romeo and Juliet, writing: Whats in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. What matters is the subject and not what the subject is called. But this is an over-simplification because changing the subject would make the quote non-sense: That which we call a fish by any other name would smell as sweet. Words have meaning.

Situational awareness is critical when youre on the gauges, right? Few of us will argue that with a good EFIS its childs play to maintain that situational awareness, regardless of the quality of your scan. So far, so good.

While some readers probably welcome a refresher on turbulence, shear, and thunderstorm dangers, others might see it as beating a dead horse. But Wx Smarts is that intersection between my 30 years of forecasting and your thousands of hours of instrument time. Within these articles I guarantee theres always something that wasnt fully covered in flight school or the FAA circulars. Whether its more detail or just an unusual situation, the goal is to keep you interested, thinking outside the box, and having more insight into aviation meteorology than the average pilot.

You are flying the VOR-A approach into Salem Memorial (K33) in your Cessna 182. The airport has no tower, with Class E airspace starting at 700 feet AGL. The winds favor Runway 17. You dive n drive after the DME stepdown and break out at 680 feet AGL with the runway in sight two miles ahead. Do you (a) cross midfield and make left downwind to 17, or (b) turn right to the upwind leg for Runway 17 and make left traffic from there, or (c) turn left before reaching the airport and make right traffic for 17.

Which came first: the chicken or the Federal Egg Administration? Impossible to say. Physics teaches us that when Bernoulli found lift, his nemesis, Newton, said there must be an opposing reaction. So, when the Wright brothers flew, government pondered how to keep them from impacting all those other aeronauts. Little happened because of Newtons Law of Administrative Inertia: An agency at rest remains at rest until acted upon by an un-ignorable force. …

After 24 years of flying fighters in the U.S. Air Force, including a tour with the Thunderbirds, I retired in 2006 and started a new career as an airline pilot. Concurrently, the Patriots Jet Team, flying Experimental Aero L-39s, invited me to join its aerobatic team. After coming up as a pilot in general aviation […]

If you live west of the Mississippi, out where most of the military airspace and where most of the testing is done, youre well familiar with those pesky NOTAMs announcing interference testing of GPS or outright loss of the GPS signals. Most of us ignore them.