Everybody is flying less these days. Flight time in piston-powered personal airplanes is probably off the most due to the high fuel prices, but the economy and fuel costs are trimming flight hours for airlines and corporate operators, too. The noise office at my home base, Westchester County Airport just north of New York City, […]
By now you have no doubt read that the big cabin, ultra-long-range Falcon 7X uses fly-by-wire technology to connect the human pilot to the flight controls, a first for business jets. Falcon insists on calling this a digital flight control system (DFCS) because all of the computers are digital, not analog, but to a pilot […]
So far as I know, there are only three things in life about which one must be very careful: surgery, flying and how you treat other people. The rest will take care of itself. So there are elaborate rules that govern these three critical domains. This explains the preflight inspection, the need for a careful […]
The first thing that hits me is the silence. As Jacques Brun and his D140 Mousquetaire II disappear into the distance, it is suddenly very, very quiet. I look around. Then the full craziness and impact of my predicament hit me. And I start to feel very, very small. Five minutes ago, I was happily […]
It’s a lot like the early days of the Volkswagen. In the late ’50s when you drove a VW Beetle and you saw another one on the road, you tooted, flashed your lights and waved. There just weren’t that many on the highways so a sighting was an occurrence. Today, when I’m flying and I […]
It took awhile, but the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) finally is getting around to doing for non-commercial aviation what its done for the airlines. In early October, the TSA proposed a new set of security regulations targeting privately operated (i.e., Part 91) large airplanes, those with a maximum gross takeoff weight greater than 12,500 pounds. Its part of the agencys proposed new large aircraft standard security program, or LASSP, which attempts to consolidate overlapping rules and create new ones. The TSA “anticipates that this proposed rule would require approximately 10,000 aircraft operators and 315 airport operators, most of whom are not currently required to do so, to implement security programs.” While we have no way to know, we think thats underestimated. And we doubt the TSA knows, either.
When departing IFR from a tower-controlled airport, planning your initial route is easy. You may have a challenging departure procedure, but you depart as cleared or as directed, immediately under positive control. It sounds complicated, but its actually easier than the alternative. The alternative, since you asked, is an IFR departure from a non-towered airport. In this case, youre entirely responsible for terrain clearance until you make it into controlled airspace and you must plan an obstacle clearance departure route on your own. Your options (and responsibilities) are different depending on whether its VMC, marginal VFR or IMC. What do you need to consider? How do you choose? If you want to know what youre expected to do under a given set of circumstances, the first place to look is the regs. FAR 91.175 specifies what pilots are required to do for takeoff and landing under IFR. Although 91.175 gives us a lot of good information about landing minima and decision heights, and what needs to be visible to proceed from the missed approach point to landing, it is basically mute on the subject of instrument departures.
We all work hard to develop the skills necessary to pass a checkride. A lot of effort and expense is involved. But we often lose sight of the real objective-not just building those skills to pass a checkride, but to keep those skills sharp so that we might call upon them when theyre needed. One mechanism to help us do that efficiently is a proficiency checklist, one inspired by an Aviation Safety article enough years ago that its been lost in the easily accessed archives. Recently weve gotten some feedback from long-time readers that they liked the article and still use the ideas presented there. They suggested we revisit the idea and present it again. Given the extraordinary cost of fuel and flying today, its become ever more difficult to allocate the money to just go up and play or even to simply maintain proficiency. Increasingly, weve got to have a specified purpose to justify going flying. Before we delve into the proficiency checklist, though, lets take a look at the way a typical GA pilot maintains proficiency.
Are you a proactive or reactive pilot? From our early primary training days, weve learned to fly by the airspeed indicator and listen for the stall warning horn when we venture too close to the lower edge of the planes airspeed envelope. Or, we live with the monotone blare while practicing the stall series. But what does it really tell us? Like other traditional primary instruments, there is some level of lag in their indications, and the information we receive is delayed or incomplete. Enter the angle of attack (AOA) indicator. While ubiquitous in gliders, where lift is life, chances are good your primary trainer did not have such instrumentation on board, although your training covered the concept of angle of attack. Ah, stalls. During primary training, we memorize the aircrafts stall speeds, clean and dirty, in 1G flight. We are further admonished that the stall speed increases as the wing loading, as well as gross weight, increases. And then theres density altitude to consider. All these factors conspire to sabotage lift, and while the dissipation of lift has its place (such as right before touchdown), its better to be proactive in preserving lift than chasing its loss.
The trickle-down effect of installation of glass cockpits in increasingly modest airplanes has changed the type of checkout a pilot gets when seeking to rent a machine from the local FBO. Because presentation of attitude, altitude and speed of the airplane, along with health of its various systems, has changed so dramatically from round-gauge airplanes, there has to be a fair amount of time spent with an instructor on the ins and outs of the video screens. This is a very good thing, if for no other reason than getting a firm introduction to the avionics of an airplane before launching into the blue unknown may prevent a few pilots from killing themselves. One hopes the days of “Hey, its an airplane, lead me to it and Ill fly it” soon will fade into aviation legend, along with their associated accidents. The good news is that the newer, more technically advanced airplanes tend to have fewer secret corners in either their systems or their handling as certification rules have become more sophisticated. While some bemoan the increasingly “vanilla” flavor of handling and systems in newly certified airplanes, its hard not to appreciate that they tend to have fewer little secrets that will kill the uneducated. However, the reality is that most pilots are still flying airplanes acquiring senior citizen status-the airplanes, I mean-and failure to spend time learning the details of a particular type prior to flying it can prove embarrassing at the very least.
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