From the January 24, 2012 Issue
Finding A CFI
In a perfect world, all flight instructors would be smiling, retired airline captains who would patiently and benevolently impart the benefit of thousands of hours of safe aircraft operation to the eager minds of the less experienced. Unfortunately, ours is not a perfect world. Most Aviation Safety readers are already certificated pilots, but we all need a CFI for recurrent training and required flight reviews.
Current Issue
Automating Weather
Properly managing risk is essential to successfully pursuing lifes more exciting adventures. Activities such as scuba diving, downhill skiing, motorcycling, mountaineering and, of course, flying, all entail elements of risk which we must consider and manage if the thrills we seek are to be experienced more than once. But risk management often is poorly understood: While most people believe themselves to be prudent, the reality is large risks are often ignored and minor dangers grossly exaggerated. In general aviation, our inability to assess risk properly is evidenced by the number of weather-related accidents consistently gracing NTSB logs, even in the face of widely available near-real-time meteorological data on the ground and in the cockpit.
Five Reasons Your Landings Suck
Landings are typically the pilots biggest challenge, presenting great frustration when we screw them up even as recognition of doing it right is as rare as $2.00/gallon avgas. Apparently, the act of returning to terra firma is one we simply cant seem to master consistently. One of the reasons is each days conditions are different from the previous flights, and applying what we remember from themif anythingwont always work. Another reason is the pilot may not have enough experience to know how to gauge conditions and modify the pattern and approach to compensate for todays conditions.
Engine-Related
They say flying is hours and hours of boredom punctuated by a few fleeting moments of occasional terror. For the pilot flying a single, maybe it starts as a vibration youre pretty sure youve never felt before, or as a slight pulse of the engine, a muffled thump, popping or a stumble. Maybe your airspeed has dropped off, and the gauges arent indicating what they should, or where you left them. The good news is engines rarely stop completely without warning. The bad news? Odds are, if it gets this far into the process of trying to get your attention about a fuel-related issue, things are poised to get more interesting rapidly.
Getting Disoriented
You just broke out of the clag on final, late in the day, with the weather at minimums, when illusion strikes. Are you low on the approach? High? Not sure? At the last moment you realize youre high and long; time to go missed. Maybe it worked the other way around; youre on approach and as you get to where you expect the threshold marks to pass below you realize youre low, short and about to touch downshort of the runway. At its worst, these vision deceptions can contribute to spatial disorientation in VMC thats more confusing than the dizziness of becoming disoriented inside the eggshell of IMC.
Zero-Zero Departure
Part 91 operators have a lot of flexibility in their operations not available to commercial flights conducted under Parts 135 or 121. Whenever persons or property is being carried for compensation, different rules apply. One of them involves minimum weather requirements for takeoff under IFR. The non-commercial Part 91 operator, however, has no such restrictions. We can blast off into any weather conditions we want without needing to meet a visibility minimum or having an alternate airport nearby in case of a problem developing shortly after takeoff. With that flexibility, of course, comes some responsibilities.
Cut, Broken, Cracked
During an annual inspection, the right ruddervator trim control cable was found routed incorrectly and cutting through the right ruddervator control tube approximately 75 percent. The tube also had signs of a crack originating from the damaged section of the tube (cut area), and had begun to bend as a result of weakening. There were no maintenance entries noted in the logbook to determine when this may have occurred.

