Search Results for: Lear 45

Years ago I was flying my RV-4 in the narrow VFR slot between the old Washington ADIZ and the expanded Camp David TFR when I lost my GPS. Without a VOR receiver, I contacted Washington Center. The Call went as follows:Me: Washington Center, Experimental One Four Foxtrot Tango.Washington Center: Experimental One Four Foxtrot Tango, go ahead.Me: Ive lost all navaids over Frederick and Im concerned that I will violate airspace and cause a little excitement.…

After a long weekend at the cabin with the family, youve packed up the flying family truckster for the Sunday afternoon return from Rural Island Muni back to Bigtown International. Passing through 1000 feet AGL, you push Direct-Direct to re-center the GPS route and turn on course-no obstacle departure procedure from this uncontrolled field-when the engine stumbles badly.

The M.O. of IFR magazine is bringing to daylight all those little corners of instrument flying where the real-world practices differ from the regs, or at least where playing the game a bit differently than you learned in ground school has payoff without jeopardizing safety.

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.

It used to be the procedure turn (PT) was the lynchpin of many an instrument approach. Youd track to the VOR or NDB station located on the airport, fly outbound, use a PT to reverse course, and fly back to the station on a specific course while descending to the specified minimum descent altitude. If you didnt visually acquire the airport, locating the missed approach point was a simple matter of identifying station passage.

If I were crowned king, my first decree would be to abolish the official winds and temperatures aloft forecast, also known as the FBWinds. Its an outdated product thats fraught with problems. The problems get compounded when pilots unknowingly misuse the forecast.

An item recently crossed our desks that has caused some head scratching: Teterboro had a revised charted visual departure procedure for IFR clearances. Of course, everyone knows about SIDs-weve analyzed bunches of ’em in these pages over the years. And most of us will occasionally ask for a VFR departure. Visual approaches (charted or not) are common.

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 […]

An increasing amount of instrument flying is done using technologically advanced airplanes and sophisticated avionics. Correct use of automation improves safety immensely by giving pilots the time to monitor systems, gather information, and plan ahead. But researchers have found that as a group we do not use automation effectively. Automation presents additional challenges. Over reliance […]

Imagine a Piper J3 Cub parked beside a mighty double-decker Airbus A380. The two airplanes couldn’t be more different, yet both function on the same four principles: thrust, drag, lift, and weight. The 1.2 million pound Airbus just scales them up a thousand times over the 1,200 pound Piper. If the Command Center determines that […]