What is VMC?
While the Pilot’s Operating Handbook shows VMC for the aircraft, the VMC in flight varies depending on many conditions. It’s similar to the published...
Those Grey Areas
Most instrument trips end with one approach and one landing, after which you go about your day. For those times when one approach doesn’t...
ATC Uses Checklists too
What do operations of any two aircraft, be they a heavy Boeing 777 or the tiniest piston-engine light sport aircraft, have in common? Checklists,...
Done That Lately?
Exploring new places with your airplane can be fun, but sometimes that requires being comfortable with operations you don’t do often. It can also...
Two Up, Two Down
You can fly a lot of IFR these days without encountering anything but GPS approaches with LPV minimums. In this challenge, you’ll fly departures...
Build Your Own Sim, Pt. 4
You can think of your sim like a desktop operating system: By itself, it’s not extremely useful; only when you install third-party applications on...
IFR Muscle Builders
In the opening phases of World War II, our country was feverishly training pilots for war. Thousands of cadets earned coveted US Army Air...
Augmented Reality
These Sim Challenges have been accused of creating “gotchas” to catch the unsuspecting—and rightly so. That’s part of the game. So we decided it...
You Can’t Rush Things
Flying in the system is about, well, flying, and not so much about checking the boxes of 14 CFR Part 91-fill-in-the-blank. Yet the rules...
Build Your Own Sim, Pt. 3
Last time in this series on building a home simulator we said that Part Three would discuss adding third-party extensions to your basic sim....
Hey, You Can’t Do That!
There’s an old joke about the retired airline pilot who checks out in a Cessna 172 after years of flying heavy iron. The pilot...
In the SIM in Social
Annual recurrent simulator training takes multiple forms. For more advanced aircraft, typically turboprops and jet aircraft, that training takes place at a large formal...