Questions Answered
Just like pilots, controllers get plenty of questions, comments, concerns, and sometimes complaints. Bonus: Writing these articles gives me an opportunity to address some...
Staying Engaged
Recently I attended a Rusty Pilot session and learned (or re-learned as the case may be) several aspects of our aviating world that laid...
Legal isn’t Always Safe
Sitting in seat 34F of a 737 MAX-9, I’m leafing through the dog-eared inflight magazine. It makes a big fuss about the airline’s offerings....
Minimum Altitudes
Instrument training is littered with acronyms and abbreviations. Altitudes like MEA, MCA, MOCA, OROCA can end up being the bane of students. And that’s...
Changing of the Guard
You’re flying along, listening to a controller issue instructions to many aircraft. From one second to the next, you suddenly start hearing a different...
Who’s On First?
It was an IMC day with plenty of arrivals and departures taxing out. For a VFR tower like ours, IMC days are the easiest...
First Come, First Served
Most pilots have heard at some point that ATC separates aircraft on a first come, first served (FCFS) basis, but have experienced the opposite....
Your Instructor Lied
Whether it’s a result of faulty instruction or an accumulation of bad habits over time, I often see pilots who come in for a...
The Honorable Pilot
Recently I got a request from an instrument student. He needed help fielding the inevitable systems and scenario-based questions about the G1000’s many failure...
Revisiting RAIM
Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring is a mouthful, but it's descriptive. RAIM independently assesses the integrity of positions reported by a GPS receiver.RAIM is essential...
Threading Needles
It’s not fun trying to make a left turn out of my neighborhood. It exits onto a busy, six-lane road. There's no traffic light,...
When Ya Gotta Circle
It's a cloudy, breezy day, and you're flying the family from northern Iowa to Chanute in southeastern Kansas. Other than a headwind and a...