Pilot Proficiency

In Wx Smarts, we go beyond the basics you learned in flight school. Sure, you know that winds are stronger at higher altitudes, and that you find fronts near where the jet stream is, but why? What makes the winds flow from the southwest at 20,000 feet when theres a storm system approaching? Lets go past the usual weather playbook to look at why the given upper-air pattern is in place.

Keeping your instrument-flying skills sharp is like high school football. No, not the social activities after the game; we mean the combination of drills and scrimmage. This sim challenge is a bit of both. The scrimmage part is that youll practice in the context of a (nearly) complete flight. The drill part is that flight is focused on one skill: the anvil descent.

Thirsting for knowledge, I Googled why we drive on one side of the road rather than the other. I found a lot of obvious rubbish about quarrelsome knights and Roman charioteers. I suspect that what really happened was Henry Ford flipped a quarter and William Morris a shilling, and they came up different. Nevertheless, I […]

I should probably stick to telling flying stories, but ­occasionally I get so worked up that I can’t resist taking off on what I see as some new wacko FAA-mandated requirement or procedure. So it’s no surprise that the agency’s current ­“initiative” (in Bureaucratese) of replacing the Practical Test Standards with the Airman Certification Standards […]

Airplanes, pilots and airports: Where you find two, you’ll find the third. In my airplane-obsessed childhood, this indisputable fact led to an early acquaintance with every airfield within a 20-mile radius. These were quiet country fields, mind you, but every so often a Cessna would drop in to do a couple of touch-and-goes, or maybe […]

Growing up, I heard people say, “Sometimes you just have to learn the hard way.” We learn many valuable lessons in life this way after realizing that our decisions and actions (or lack thereof) lead to undesirable outcomes. For some situations, this is the only impactful way to affect a change in behavior — an […]

The Arrow’s oil had just been changed for the first time since my ownership. And the landing gear had been cycled a few times to confirm the microswitch that activated the flashing auto-gear-extension disable light had been successfully readjusted. The final tweaking involved a flight test to determine if the engine was indeed not quite […]

We were flying VFR, but just barely. Our group included a ­dozen Grand Canyon sightseeing pilots returning from a ­morning trip to the South Rim, an assortment of ­Cessna 206s, 207s and 310s, airplanes loaded with tourists ready for naps and completely unaware of our meandering detours as we sought safe passage. But we were all […]

A head-up display gives pilots ­access to the critical flight information needed to safely fly the aircraft while allowing them to focus their attention outside the cockpit for ­potential conflicts or threats. A HUD projector sends critical flight, navigation and aircraft energy-management data to a glass screen, called a combiner, hanging at eye level between […]

It is always hard to know about dogs and airplanes. I know how I feel about both — I like them — but will a dog like flying in an airplane? This is a chronicle of one airplane and three dogs. Ubu was a Lab-shepherd mix, not known for loyalty or obedience. I attributed his […]