Search Results for: Cessna 172

Weve discussed the benefits of personal standard operating procedures (SOP) for our own flying. Weve taken the main elements (Using an SOP in GA, September 2016) and began creating our own (DIY SOP Considerations, February 2017). Meanwhile, we tried to wean you from your do-list in favor of a flow and check (Change Your Checklist, October 2016 and DIY Flow and Check, January 2017). In this final article, we assemble a personal SOP for a light GA single.

“It totally changed my life,” Genesah Duffy says of her first flight. “The best experience I’ve ever had.” She was 25 when she took a discovery flight in a Cessna 172 out of St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport, and from there she was hooked. Genesah started out as a parts manager at Propellerhead Aviation, and she […]

Purdue Aviation is set to receive the first jet-A-burning diesel Cessna Turbo Skyhawk JT-A, which it plans to take delivery of as soon as the airplane receives its FAA certification, expected later this year. The Skyhawk JT-A is powered by a four-cylinder Continental CD-155 compression ignition engine mated to a three-blade MT Propeller composite prop. […]

TruTrak Flight Systems is now selling autopilot install kits for the Cessna 172 F through R models and the Cessna 177 after the Experimental Aircraft Association obtained the STC for the installation. TruTrak received “low risk parts manufacturer approval” from the FAA on April 3 for the non-TSO’d Vizion autopilot. The company says it is […]

I suspect that the majority of professional pilots encounters their most interesting jobs early in their careers: places where the pay is rotten, the airframes have 70,000 cycles on 50,000 flight hours, and tight finances put everything into a perpetual state of “What’s going to fail next?” My first flying job was in a Cessna […]

Advancing age and retirement bring on a certain sense of freedom and may, in fact, inhibit one’s social filter. And though I have worried mightily about what the devil I would do with myself once unemployed, I can report from two months in, so far, so good. An older friend told me long ago that […]

In 1958, as a stunt intended to promote the new Hacienda Hotel in Las Vegas, two pilots, Robert Timm and John Cook, stayed aloft in a Cessna 172, regularly refueled from a racing pickup truck, for 64 days and 22 hours. (Why they didn’t stay up another two hours and make it an even 65 […]

Just a little bit lower.” Those words are a great way to star in an NTSB accident report (right up there with “watch this”), since they usually precede a dangerous maneuver. While low passes are certainly not a new ­invention, the motivation for them seems to have evolved lately, and we can thank the smartphone. […]

Every instrument approach procedure we fly ends in one of two ways: We either see the runway environment and land, perhaps after circling to align ourselves with a runway, or we dont. When we dont, we fly a missed approach procedure designed to get the aircraft back to a safe altitude and position from which the next steps can be taken. Those next steps can include trying the same approach again, shooting a different one or diverting to a different airport. Its not that hard.

One of the first and most obvious choices we make when using a personal airplane is routing. We want to get from Point A to Point B, usually by the shortest, most direct route. So far, so good. What if that route increases the consequences of the risk in question, namely that our sole powerplant will fail at the worst possible time? Maybe change the route?