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“Three things in life are overrated,” I was told in medical school. “Home cooking, out of town sex and the Johns Hopkins Hospital.” Envy was surely at work. When I became an intern in the great Midwest, the saying was similar, but regionalized. “Three things in life are overrated: (HC, OOTS) and the Mayo Clinic.” […]

It’s a pretty picture, that’s for sure. Tooling along at Flight Level 280, truing out at 260 knots in pressurized comfort, a pair of powerplants humming away as the miles slip behind you. If you hadn’t already read the title, you’d probably be thinking “turboprop” right now. Unless you already fly an Aerostar. Then you’d […]

It seems that every bit of new aviation technology is initially made much more complicated and confusing for pilots to use than is necessary. For example, when GPS navigators first became available, every instructional course from the FAA or others would start out describing the constellation of GPS satellites, their orbital altitude and so on. […]

I’ve mentioned a couple of times lately that an airplane with a control-lable-pitch propeller will glide farther with the propeller in coarse pitch than in fine pitch. These terms coarse and fine aren’t exactly intuitive, but they are analogous to screw threads of coarse and fine pitch. A screw with fine threads needs more turns […]

There has been a great deal of discussion about the difficulty, or lack of it, of transitioning from conventional flight instruments to flat-panel primary flight displays (PFD). Many also worry that new instrument pilots who learn on a PFD will find it very difficult to fly safely with a conventional round dial set of gyros […]