Editor’s Log 04/05: Spring Training

By the time you read this, spring will have come to most of North America and all of us will be clogging the runways and taxiways at our local airports, trying to get airborne after a long, cold winter. And we’ll make mistakes. Hopefully, those mistakes will be small, embarrassing ones, not the kind that bend sheet metal or fracture composites.

I don’t know about you, but after even a couple of weeks between flights, I’m not as sharp as I was the last time I pushed my airplane into its hangar. My cockpit flow isn’t as good, I’ll flub a few radio transmissions and I probably won’t be as far ahead of the airplane as I should. I might forget to set the DG to the runway heading before lifto...