Pilot Proficiency

Most pilots have a backup handheld comm radio, and perhaps a handheld GPS receiver. Some go further, organizing emergency equipment in a “grab bag” and occasionally reaching for it when all is calm, just to rehearse their act. One good idea is to relegate a retired headset (or one you can buy cheap on eBay) […]

Weather to a ground person and weather to an air person are two completely different things. The ground person feels temperature and wind and precipitation and looks out the window or up at the sky at clouds. The ground person has to wait patiently for the weather in his location to change. Those of us […]

WxWorx on Wings, the weather products that XM Satellite Weather downlinks from satellites to our cockpits, is provided to XM by Baron Services’ WxWorx. The weather products are collected at two distinct collection points, one located at WxWorx’s headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama, and the other inside the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North […]

The official name is XM WX Satellite Weather. Most pilots just call it XM Weather. The neat thing about it is that it offers virtually all available weather information and can be received and displayed on handheld units or on a variety of panel-mount units. There is an instrument panel docking station system available for […]

A lot of pilots are satisfied to fly away with the terminal forecasts and metars (in plain language, please) and I suppose that might meet the letter of the law on weather information. But there is so much more than that to weather and the pilot who puts some effort into understanding weather, and how […]

I have been studying general aviation accidents for almost 50 years and it is amazing that over all this period of time we have lost eight, plus or minus a few, IFR airplanes to thunderstorms each year. It’s amazing because when I started there was little or no radar information on thunderstorms available, where now […]

I have been studying general aviation accidents for almost 50 years and it is amazing that over all this period of time we have lost eight, plus or minus a few, IFR airplanes to thunderstorms each year. It’s amazing because when I started there was little or no radar information on thunderstorms available, where now […]

I have written that it is madness to certify light airplanes for flight in icing conditions. Some have misinterpreted that to mean that I don’t think light airplanes should be equipped with ice-protection gear. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the ice protection systems that are available today, and that are not […]

To begin, pilots are almost never “trapped” by weather. Some will come up with a tale they think proves that they were “trapped,” but you simply have to fly by too many clues to wind up in weather trouble without some sense of trespass. So what is the biggest trap? Simple. The forecasts, or, the […]

I recently stumbled across what just might be the coolest pilot software application ever: Keyhole. Well, Keyhole isn’t really intended as pilot software, but pilots are guaranteed to love it. Keyhole-the company was acquired by Google last fall-takes a huge (20 terabytes) database of high-resolution satellite photography-some areas of the country have more detail than […]