IFR

In May 2019, two men took off from Tipton Airport (KFME) in Fort Meade, Maryland, for a pleasure flight. They were in a Guimbal Cabri G2 helicopter, and had hoped to find and photograph a relative of the passenger who was fishing from a boat in the Chesapeake Bay. The morning was foggy; when the […]

Laypeople are both astonished at a pilot’s abilities and wholly unimpressed during the act of flight itself. They sleep like children during instrument approaches to minimums but lose their minds when they get even a taste of light turbulence in the flight levels. It seems most people don’t know what to be afraid of and […]

Weather is one of the biggest variables in general aviation flight and a contributing cause of many accidents. While there is no way for us pilots to control the weather, we can modify our flight paths to prevent unplanned encounters with Mother Nature. Fortunately, doing so has become a lot easier in the past few […]

Dr. Scott Dennstaedt says, “General aviation has been plagued with a deadly virus for many decades called VFR into IMC. Flying visual flight rules (VFR) into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) continues to be the leading cause of fatal weather-related accidents.” Dennstaedt says his new product EZWxBrief is a cure for this virus. “Many general aviation […]

If you enjoy watching airplanes, especially any of the quickly declining global fleet of jumbo jets, Muhammad Ali International—the old Standiford Field (KSDF)—in Louisville, Kentucky, is an excellent place. The home of UPS, KSDF offers the opportunity to see large Boeings—747s, 757s and 767s—as well as Airbus A300s and McDonnell Douglas MD-11s operating day and night. […]

In December 2019, a Canadian-registry Piper Aerostar 602P with three aboard left Cabo San Lucas in Baja California, Mexico, to return home to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The group stopped overnight at Chino, California, east of Los Angeles—perhaps to visit the aviation museum there—and continued the next day to Nanaimo with a […]

Sporty’s has released the next volume in its suite of flight training applications, the Instrument Rating Course for 2021. The course can be accessed through the Sporty’s hub, just like previously released courseware in the system. The Instrument Rating Course—like the Learn to Fly course that debuted last fall—offers comprehensive video-based training, a knowledge test […]

Single-pilot IFR is the hardest thing most people will ever do. If you’re a heart surgeon, you might disagree, but for almost everyone else, there’s nothing that compares. The combination of high stakes and an unrelenting workload makes for a unique challenge, and there’s no undo button. Instrument training should embrace that challenge, with a […]

I live in the Deep South, and I emerge from summer begging for a massive cold front to clear the Florida/Georgia state line and bring some ­much-needed relief from the blistering heat and stifling humidity. Come the end of September, I am aching for sight of high cirrus, introducing a phalanx of low cumulus, chased […]

What goes before that, in planning and training, determines what kind of instrument pilot emerges from the process. Here we want to go through what it takes to produce the best and most complete instrument-rated pilot. When we were writing about learning to fly, it was suggested that a private pilot course should be completed […]