Search Results for: Lear 45

Is a new subscriber, I am very satisfied with the magazine. However, the article, “The Brazilian Midair” (January 2007), contains one statement I consider arguable. Brazilian ATCs pre-takeoff clearance to the Legacy is quoted as, “N600XL, Clear, 370, Manaus,” followed by the statement that “Any pilot receiving this clearance while still on the ground would have been justified in believing their flight had been cleared to climb and maintain FL370 all the way to its destination.” Thats where I disagree.

One of the fallacies of flying IFR in marginal-to-good weather is that its safe to presume everyone else out there is on the same page, under the watchful eye of ATC. Instead, its completely legal for someone else to be scud-running in barely VFR weather while youve gone to the trouble to get the rating, file the flight plan and follow the clearance.

After I wrote my article last month about some of the mindsets that can get us into trouble, I found an excellent example of one of those situations. Air Transat Flight TS236 was an Airbus A330 that was on its way from Toronto to Lisbon. The discovery of metallic particles in the oil system about […]

One surefire way for airplane makers to get a lot more performance out of their existing designs is by adding a turbocharger. It’s hardly a new approach. It’s been popular since the 1960s. And just in the past few years Columbia, Mooney and Cessna have all introduced turbocharged models, all based on good-selling existing airplanes. […]

I’ve noticed lately that I fly more and more slowly and pay more and more attention to fuel flow. Clearly this behavior is related to the rising cost of fuel; as it goes up, the best speed to fly goes down. But that relationship – speed divided by fuel flow – must be corrected by […]

As we ate breakfast at the kitchen counter, Carol and I fixated on the TV in the corner. CNN was reporting, ad nauseam, on the foiled terrorist plot in the UK. An innovative plan for mass murder on commercial airliners had become part of terrorist ingenuity. For those of you who are familiar with Bomb […]

The sight was breathtakingly sad. A middle-aged woman wearing a bright red blazer scurried across the tarmac to her waiting NetJets Cessna Encore. I sat on a bench just outside the entrance to our FBO, transfixed, wondering why she was hurrying. I had seen her before. A few minutes earlier I had watched as she […]

With tense trepidation, I watched the path of Hurricane Ernesto. For days prior to my son’s wedding in New England the storm lingered over Cuba. It was projected to get loose in the Gulf of Mexico, threatening our home in Tampa. Then the computer model shifted course eastward, away from home but towards the Atlantic […]

Everyone remembers their first solo flight. Mine was memorable for two reasons. First, the Cessna 150 I was flying had a habit of allowing its right-side window to pop open, seemingly at will. Of course, the airplane “willed” the window open shortly after I became airborne on my third touch and go.

How are your ILS approaches going? As the saying goes, it takes practice to make perfect, or even to keep current. The reward is the nice feeling and confidence boost received once you lock onto an actual-weather ILS approach, especially one you know from the beginning is going to turn out to be precise.