Search Results for: maintaining your airplane

The relationship between angle of bank and stall speed isnt a mystery, but it is a bit complicated. Heres whats going on, and why.

Looking through the aviation catalogs you can quickly be overwhelmed by the choices of pilot equipment and gear. In Sporty’s Pilot Shop catalog, for example, there are two pages of logbook options and half a page of logbook covers and cases. What’s a pilot to do? When I first started taking flying lessons, I gobbled […]

Battery Maintenance
With reference to Its Not A River In Egypt (Learning Experiences, January 2006), I do not agree with the crews judgment to fly the airplane with a known problem. The Barons batteries were in such a low state of charge they would not crank the engines.

External power should never be used when the internal battery power isnt sufficient to start the engine(s). Dead batteries require three to four hours to recharge fully from the aircraft generating system. Therefore they are not considered airworthy in a discharged state.

Batteries that have enough power to crank and start the engine(s) will generally recharge to a reasonable state of charge prior t…

Cross-controlling is often necessary to maintain coordinated flight, but it can be dangerous. Its not whether you cross the controls, but how and when.

If you think your airplane has enough back-up systems to make single-component failures a non-event, you could be wrong. Redundant systems often arent.

I have written that it is madness to certify light airplanes for flight in icing conditions. Some have misinterpreted that to mean that I don’t think light airplanes should be equipped with ice-protection gear. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the ice protection systems that are available today, and that are not […]

If an engine quits on takeoff, where you go is less important than how you arrive. A straight-ahead landing remains the best low-risk option.

If you had the choice between buying a real J-3 or an LSA knockoff of a J-3, wouldn’t you pick the real McCoy? I used to think it was a no brainer. I’m not so sure any more. I stopped by the home of the American Legend Aircraft Company in Sulphur Springs, Texas, located about […]

It was just a rumor, but I liked the idea. I’d heard that the FAA was going to equip all the airplanes in the Washington, D.C., area with ADS-B and UAT so it could better monitor their movements. The rumor got legs from the unfortunate, apparently inadvertent, incursion by the Cessna 150 into the Washington […]

One of the keys to slow flight is understanding that much of what we know about aerodynamics changes when the airspeed is low.