Search Results for: maintaining your airplane

It’s a rare airplane that appears on the scene and hangs on, long after production has ended, not as a nod to nostalgia but because the airplane keeps letting pilots (or their bosses) do things they want to do. Be it making money transporting people and packages deep into mountainous terrain, keeping an eye on […]

Face it: We love our GPS. Many of us fly with two of em installed, plus a portable for good measure. Its arguably the most revolutionary advance in navigation, automation and IFR capabilities. Satellites now allow the most basic aircraft to navigate with amazing precision.However, there are caveats for modern RNAV pilots. Weve become overly dependent on GPS when it comes to the cornerstone of IFR navigation-situational awareness (SA). That means many of us are losing touch with the basic skill of knowing where we are in our heads, not just on the moving map. Also, like any piece of equipment, we need to use GPS as a tool, not a crutch, especially when a trip changes drastically due to weather, systems malfunctions, and the like.

Relationships are often defined by shared experiences. So was the case with Loretta and me. When the tower asked if we wanted to declare an emergency, my date’s panicked expression suggested that our future together might require more than a safe landing. The Cessna 182 ferry mission was to be routine. N15AP had just been […]

Air traffic controller Ray Smid watched the yellow blips slide across his radar screen. The circles moved in silence, but Smid never forgot that they embodied real aircraft. It didn’t matter if the traffic was big or small. Lives were lost if the blips merged. The eraser-shaped images toted “data blocks” displaying flight number, destination, […]

Let me say at the outset that general aviation pilots do not have to worry about wake turbulence because wake turbulence will only be dangerous on takeoff, departure, climb-out, enroute, descent, approach and landing.See, no problem.Oh, uh…wait-that pretty much covers the entire flight, doesnt it? Maybe we should worry about wake turbulence.

courtesy the NTSB.”

I scratched my chin as I tried to discern the unfamiliar code that our airline computer system had attached to three days of my reserve schedule. A call to crew schedule offered only a verbal shoulder shrug. It was suggested that I call our flight standards department. Hmm … Flight standards is responsible for maintaining […]

While the HSI was a game-changer for the instrument pilot by raising the bar on situational awareness, it introduced more avionics complexity, especially when connected to multiple nav sources. In failure mode, and for the pilot who doesnt know how to operate it, the instrument can be a killer. When I was a new avionics technician, Narcos DGO-series HSI system was the ground breaker. But, not all pilots fully understood what an HSI would do, and fewer yet understood how they worked. Thats somewhat true even today.

I awoke to the faded pastel orange of a rising sun. The sun’s glow was making a feeble attempt at blending into a dominant gray winter’s overcast. Only seconds into the transition from sleep to reality, my eyes began to track a pair of pinpoint amber lights. The lights moved at a rapid pace from […]

Everyone remembers the first airplane they flew. But what about the second one? Chances are it was a lot like the first one, but still was different. While the make and model may have been the same, the serial and registration numbers were different, of course. Even trivial differences between the two likely was a topic of discussion with your instructor. The conversation may have included how different avionics equipment was installed, or one of them never had a working landing light, or had a prop offering better performance. In an extreme, you could have been mixing makes, models, wing position and avionics. There likely was a moment where you couldnt find that blemish on the windshield you used as a reference point, or found the throttle too stiff.