Search Results for: maintaining your airplane

The warm wind through the steel brace wires generated a distinct whistle over the rumble of the Stearman’s big radial engine as we followed our shadow up and over the rolling green hills. The prop churned the summer air and flung it across the open cockpit, beating it against my head in a steady, rhythmic […]

Five years ago I adopted a different kind of recurrency routine for myself. It did away with the annual three days of fire-hose drinking and associated abuse and replaced it with a monthly program that would cover all the details over the course of a year. I wrote about it in July 2007 IFR.

Despite the magazine vogue of articles on glass cockpits and technologically advanced airplanes, thousands of us continue to fly steam gauges. A well-equipped steam-gauge airplane enables a competent pilot to fly the same mission that a glass airplane can fly. The Apollo spacecraft were steam-gauge equipped and carried men to the moon.

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 […]

Until just recently, the role for most pilots was pilot flying with manual control, occasionally supplemented with autoflight when the workload was high and we needed a helping hand. With the increasing availability of more and more capable systems, that role is changing to one of systems manager or, worse, just systems observer. That’s not […]

Any activity that regularly kills between one half and one percent of its participants has room for improvement. Cutting the GA accident and death rate has been a cause celeb recently, and we heartily approve. Here at IFR, we decided to make our own contribution by delving into the accident rate specifically for IMC, focusing on where the outcomes were fatal.

Judgment is the cornerstone of the air traffic control profession. This basic trait, common among thousands of successful air traffic controllers worldwide, allows controllers to face a variety of situations-including unusual pilot requests-and act appropriately.

Our CRJ-200 was sliding down through an overcast layer, following the glideslope to Runway 28 at Chicago OHare. Everything was normal, just like it always is. My airline job means I make this approach a couple of times a week.

Concerns about pilot aging are just as important for the younger pilot as for the more silver-haired among us. The US population is getting greyer, and it’s plain to see when looking around any airport, so too is the average pilot. This aging brings numerous challenges and a few rewards that should be important to […]

Don’t Need ‘em? Delete ‘em.In “Readback” in June, you said that the major airports at the heart of Class B airspace typically only use ILS and visual approaches. Why, then, does the FAA continue to plan, update, certify and flight check all the other approaches to these airports? It must be a considerable cost—in time […]