AVIONICS

I vividly remember my first VFR flight into the Washington, D.C., Special Flight Rules Area (SFRA, previously the D.C. ADIZ). Arriving into Leesburg, Va., I ducked under the Dulles Class B airspace and entered the downwind behind another aircraft. Thats when I heard the voice: Watch your altitude. I figured Potomac Approach somehow smelled fresh blood and would have a SWAT team greeting me on landing.

It was late afternoon and time to fly home after a productive business meeting. Before heading to the airport, the pilot called Flight Service. Most of the significant weather was along a cold front just to the north of his east-west proposed route. The briefer mentioned some light snow showers were showing up on radar near the front. There were a few pilot reports of light to moderate icing, but all of them were associated with the weather to the north. The briefer alerted the pilot to an AIRMET for IFR conditions and mountain obscuration along a portion of his proposed route, but as of yet no en route advisories for structural icing had been issued.

Say what you like about pilots flying around with their heads up their MFDs rather than looking outside the cockpit, but when it comes to spotting traffic more than dozen wing-lengths from the airplane, a glance at traffic display is worth a hundred FAA-approved, 10-degree scans out the window.

Ive come to believe that single-pilot IFR in a fully loaded, glass-cockpit-but without using an autopilot-can be the toughest IFR flying you can do. The past month has found me in the clouds with and without students in a couple different airframes that I hadnt recently flown. Thats important because I wasnt in the groove with known power settings and trim. Theres more load on the scan when the plane is less familiar and thats where glass shows its biggest weakness: Visual channel overload.

I thoroughly enjoy your IFR magazine and eagerly look for it every month. I do have a concern about the front-page caption, Bitch-slapped by physics, found on the cover of the October 2010 issue. Come on, Jeff. All of you at IFR magazine are excellent writers who know how to get the information out in a comprehensible form and fashion that is entertaining and useful. Using that description for your article about V-speeds is inappropriate.

In his June 2014 article, Know Your Height AGL, Frank Bowlin explained the potential uses of a radar altimeter. As I read that, I reflected on my airline days where we used a pressure altimeter set to read our height above the airport. In contrast to costs of many thousands of dollars for a radar altimeter, some of the same-and critical-benefits can be had for a thousand dollars or less by purchasing and installing an altimeter dedicated to read QFE, or height above the airport. Sometimes QFE is even better.

The tale used to go like this: Its a dark and stormy night. Youve spent the last 500 miles bouncing around the inside of an unbroken cloud, living in a world of round instruments 20 inches in front of your face. Youve kept the attitude indicator blue-side up, the altimeters 100s hand at 12 oclock, and the CDI needle within a degree or two of center as VOR after VOR has ticked by. On departure, the TAF for your destination was sickeningly close to minimums-but that information is hours old.

Let's start with an old hangar-flying puzzle. You're outbound on the localizer back course. Your HSI course points back to the runway and you've...

Even pros flying hundreds of hours a year slip up once in awhile. Those of us who fly fewer hours, however, clearly have increased odds of doing so. Nevertheless, when you do goof, a request to call ATC doesnt have to become a license altering event if you follow some time-tested advice.

I started flying in 1963 at the Air Force ROTC program at Indiana University. This put me in the interesting position of studying the writings of both the Air Force and the five-year-old FAA. Poor writing was rampant. In fact, the highest grade my instructors would give these writings was a D.

The battle has raged a long time between useful, inexpensive, portable, non-certified devices and panel-mount certified instrumentation. In practice, weve long used non-certified portables for navigation and we havent been falling out of sky in swarms.

Most pilots I know are lazy. Writing as one who has spent most of his career flying airplanes, thats meant to be a compliment. The lazy pilot tends to accomplish the least work necessary in order to achieve the intended goal. This usually improves workload management and provides a greater reserve of attention. However, sometimes laziness can get you into trouble, such as in determining when to intercept and track a glidepath. …