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Heard this one on a hard-IFR trip down V27 off the California coast. The weather was scuzzy with heavy rain from the surface up to the flight levels with no layers at all. Despite this, ATC valiantly continued trying to call traffic:NORCAL Approach: Skywest Two Niner Six Five, traffic is a Beech Sierra, 12 oclock, opposite direction at 8000.Skywest 2965: Approach, Skywest Two Niner Six Five is IMC.Approach: Beech Seven Four Papa, traffic 12 oclock,…

With the advent of WAAS, the FAA developed approaches that provided vertical guidance while offering the lateral accuracy that previously was only available with an ILS or localizer approach. It was named LPV for Localizer Performance with Vertical and now sports decision heights as low as 200 feet.

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.

What do you do when youre only 90-percent sure you know what ATC wants? Some folks would just do what they think they were told. Others would try-no matter how futilely- to get a clarification. Still others would do nothing, assuming the controller will call back because they didnt acknowledge the instruction.

It may surprise U.S. pilots to know that much (perhaps most) private instrument flying in Europe is done in U.S.-registered aircraft using an FAA-issued pilots certificate. But the times are a-changing. The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is now the sole authority across much of Europe, enforcing by law what was an amalgamation of voluntary agreements between countries.

The FAA says we should stop crashing-good idea, yes? The problem, though, is to figure out why we crash so we can stop doing whatever it is that makes us crash. I have a few broad-brush ideas about why we crash: bad luck, incompetence and bad judgment.

As much as we drill instrument students on the 10 items from FAR 91.175 (c) you could see to go below DA/MDA, in the real world if we see anything that might be part of the runway, we land on it. Its nearly certain that youll first see the ALS, allowing you to descend to 100 feet AGL and search for something resembling a runway.

Keeping your holding skills up-to-date these days feels like keeping a working fax machine around; well, I suppose this might come in handy. Someday. Maybe.

Theres no question that practicing on your desktop flight simulator will help your instrument flying. It exercises your instrument scan, it solidifies your procedures such as chart briefings, and it keeps you connected to flying when grabbing a real airplane isnt an option.

You never thought about oxygen during your training until after your advanced ratings years later when you finally started flying at altitudes requiring oxygen. At first you probably just borrowed a portable bottle. Perhaps later you flew a plane with a built-in system. But you never liked that cannula stuck up your nose, so you bought a pressurized twin Cessna 421 with its requisite built-in oxygen system. With pressurization, you again no longer think about oxygen.But…