Training & Sims

I read with interest-and a chuckle at the question why no one wants to be a pilot today-your editorial, Pilot Shortage Arrives in April 2013. Bottom line is that its just too damned expensive. Getting into the game costs tens of thousands and takes precious time people do not have these days. They see no value in being a pilot. People today have many alternatives for their hard-earned discretionary/recreational funds.

Remember when Garmin first came out with their GNS 430? What a wonderful list of features it had. But, even after a few years in service, it turned out that many pilots were intimidated by the sophisticated routing capability and few ventured beyond using direct-to for navigation.

Last January, the FAA changed internal policy on reporting potential pilot deviations. The stated goal was to discover why adverse safety events happen and identify the risks. The real-world fallout of this is pilots are getting warning letters in the mail for events they would have blown off in the past.

I remember a few years ago I watched my captain try vainly to intercept the localizer. He had a good intercept angle, but the needle just wouldnt come in. Interestingly enough, though, my HSI showed a completely different-and more reasonable-picture.

For those of you who havent been following our little IFR soap opera with Lockheed Martin over Flight Service, heres the nutshell summary: We visited the under-construction Virginia hub of LMs Flight Service in 2006. It looked promising. We looked again in 2008 after the program fell on its face and was working to resurrect itself.

Having flown with right-seaters who possess no more pilot credentials than having a pulse, I can attest that a brief interview with the co-pilot candidate and few minutes of chatting and playing with buttons in the cockpit can turn dead weight into useful load.

Common wisdom in the computer world seems to be that if youre not adding features at breakneck speed, youre falling off the trailing edge into oblivion. We dont subscribe to that thinking; a good program doesnt need constant improvement to be a best tool.

If theres one system that breeds overconfidence in the neophyte, its ice protection gear. Ice in the forecast? Youve got that known-ice Turbo Bugsmasher tucked away in a hangar just for such occasions. Problem solved, right? Not so fast.

I recently endured the annual torment known as recurrent training for FAA FASTeam Rep status. The process is just a minor torment: two 45-minute, pre-recorded sessions of narrated PowerPoint with quizzes at the end. Its the kind of training thats more a checkbox on some bureaucratic tally sheet than any effective means of teaching.

If none of your vast experience involves a major international airport, it is incomplete. There are times when flying into a big airport is...

The physical world is full of inverse proportions and one I've noticed is that when winter temperatures dip to, say, 20 degrees, my northern...

As a technician, I think of EFIS in terms of failures. While most pilots don't need to dig deep into system schematics, a little...