Aviation Safety

Is Owning Safer?

Pilots decide to buy their own airplane for a variety of reasons. It could be a business decision, helping ensure coverage of a relatively wide sales area, or perhaps an aerial photography business. Specialized flight training—like acro, or a quicky instrument rating—also can be a reason. Recreation or personal transportation is yet another. One of my major motivations was safety.

Navigating The Sim Thicket

I’ve been teaching people how to fly airplanes for 28 years now, and at this point people tell me I’m pretty good at it. One of the things I learned early on is that the cockpit environment is a horrible classroom in which to teach the basics of flight. It’s noisy, full of distractions, occasionally unpredictable and constantly moving. It should not be a secret to even the newest flight instructor that all of this is a challenge to a typical primary student’s senses. Frankly, any sane human being is scared of it, at first, though few would admit to it.

Revitalizing GA

The average small airplane in the United States is now 40 years old and the regulatory barriers to bringing new designs to market are resulting in a lack of innovation and investment in small airplane design.” So states one of the findings in a new bill introduced May 7 in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) and four cosponsors. The bill, H.R. 1848, is named the “Small Airplane Revitalization Act of 2013,” and its main goal is for the FAA to finalize its ongoing effort to rewrite FAR Part 23, regulations on certification of small airplanes, by December 31, 2015.

Fixing Your Flare

No matter how smooth and enjoyable the flight, your passengers always will remember the landing. Anything other than a single, bounce-free touchdown is ripe for comment and, if your passengers also are pilots, ridicule. While a good landing is a combination of many factors, the last chance you have to affect its outcome is in the flare. Whether you’re flaring too high above the runway or too low, at too high an airspeed or too enthusiastically, there’s usually a fix for what ails your landings. A lot of it can come down to how you transition from approaching the runway with the nose down to the ideal nose-up, power-off attitude, inches above the runway. It’s not that hard.

IFR Weather Planning

It’s been said—and confirmed, in a conference I attended at the FAA’s Oklahoma City complex a couple of years ago—that you can miss every weather-related question on every FAA Knowledge Test (“written”), from Sport Pilot all the way through and including the ATP, and still pass each test...and ultimately, pass every checkride. Our instructors and aviation periodicals implore us to become students of aviation weather, but only on rare occasions are we actually given the tools we need to make weather-related go/no-go decisions. Certainly one of the most common requests I get from my recurrent flight students is for help in understanding weather well enough to make informed choices that protect their families when they fly. So how can we quickly and methodically sift through page after Internet page of aviation weather data to make informed decisions?

The Downwind Turn

Low-level, low-speed maneuvering is always a challenge, something reflected in the accident record. Whether we engage in this type of maneuvering because we’re showing off or trying to get around the traffic pattern, the risks are the same: There simply isn’t enough altitude to recover from a stall/spin if we get into one. Add some stiff wind, gusty conditions and/or poor planning to our low-speed equation and things quickly can get out of hand. That’s presuming everything else is as it should be, including an airplane loaded within its weight and balance limitations. If it’s overweight, out of balance or both, you’ve just become a test pilot on a difficult day.