Occasionally I get a note from another pilot asking about my flying, my training, the plane, or the airport. Usually the advice is too specific for general readers, but my reply to this one was long enough that it was worth posting on the site.
Pilot, who wrote, owns his own little Piper airplane and received […]
Yesterday I was in the family room while the boys were finishing up their reading before lights out. I had my laptop open and a soft voice was droning along. I struggled to remain focused. Nell walked by and said, “What are you watching?”
“Another IFR course.”
“I thought you were finished.”
Ah, but you are never finished. […]
Previously, the most exciting thing that happened during a lesson is when the wind picked up the tail of the Cherokee while I was starting my flare for landing. If my instructor had not been in the right seat, I might have bent the nose gear. (Now I am alert for this sort of gust […]
There are just a couple things left to do to get my instrument rating. Today I completed my IFR cross country flight. It had to be at least two hundred fifty nautical miles, have three different kinds of approaches, and I had to visit three airports.
I arrived at the airport at 8:15am, leaving Nell to […]
If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one’s outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by […]
IFR: Instrument Flight Rules. You can fly in the clouds.
VFR: Visual Flight Rules. A lot simpler, but you can only fly where you can see.
IMC: Instrument Meteorlogical Conditions. You can’t see where you are flying.
Way back on April 12 I made my first real IFR flight, from Santa Monica to Las Vegas (Henderson Executive Airport). […]
Okay, this is pretty cool. You can click on that link and it will show you the last time I flew the DiamondStar on an instrument flight plan. Amazing. It will show you the actual radar trace of the flight. There’s a link to the altitudes I flew at.
I need to write up the two […]
So Adam and I have carefully planned our flight to Ryan Field, Arizona. We have an oxygen system, plotted flight plan, information about the airport we’re headed to, and information about airports along the way. We have snacks packed, liters and liters of water, and even a bunch of “Brief Relief” units. (Those are little […]