System

Shortly after getting my Cessna 340, one afternoon I was flying an ILS into Modesto, CA, where wed found a temporary home for our airplane. Id recently achieved the heady milestone of 1000 hours total time and a whopping 100 hours of multi-engine time. Plus, Id just gotten all my Is (CFI, CFII, MEI), so, of course, I was truly a great pilot. Id then gotten my initial training (ground and sim) in the 340, finished off with 25 hours with an experienced Twin Cessna instructor pilot. Humility wasnt in my self-image that afternoon. By evening, it had returned with a vengeance.

Call it the familiarity trap. When planning a new route or destination, you carefully examine the charts, procedures, airport diagrams, and approach minimums. But you tend to skip a lot of these steps on well-worn routes and at your home drome. Its near-certain that youll eventually discover how this complacency can be a big gotcha.

Flying with a professional copilot spoiled me. Just calling for a checklist and having it spoon fed to me with no effort or distraction is as good as it gets. So, when I resumed flying GA-no copilot-I hunted for the perfect checklist app. I didnt find it. Until now.

Reader David Novelli asked an innocent but probing question. His primary airport has an approach that says if the local altimeter setting is unavailable you should use one from a nearby field and adjust the minimums. Weve all seen that, although few of us have actually had to take advantage of it.

For years Ive promoted the notion of a lazy pilot-one whos too lazy to do it wrong and then waste time making it right. Lazy pilots do the right thing the right way the first time.

Along with legions of other pilots, I learned to fly in Cessna Skyhawks, with six-pack instrument panels. Even when I moved on up to the 21st century and Garmin G1000-equipped 172SPs, the core aircraft remained familiar-similar V speeds, control yoke, nose wheel steering, big trim wheel. There was a comfort in the sameness.

It was once believed that all swans were white. No one considered the possibility of black swans until a Dutch explorer discovered them in Australia in 1697. That is the nature of a Black Swan event: Its rare, has an extreme impact and is predictable in retrospect.

Instrument approaches are designed such that several divergent paths and procedures funnel into one of a few common designs. Almost every approach you fly will either be a cone of narrowing vertical and lateral guidance; or a staircase of stepdowns to a minimum altitude.

Recently our flying club toured the new tower at Palm Beach International in southeastern Florida. About 60 pilots signed up to see this multimillion-dollar facility. This is what we saw.

The standard ILS approach is kind of a seen-one-seen-em-all situation. Sure, the numbers vary from one to the other, but the technique is rather straightforward and theyre all mostly the same. All you have to do is get established on the localizer, usually with a few turns from your friendly controller, wait for the glideslope needle to come in and then just follow them both to the runway. And, thats just about all there is to it. Until theres more…

Chances are youve looked at that table of precipitation types in aviation meteorology books and been fascinated by all the different possibilities. We see all these different types of codes in METAR and TAF reports every day, so why do ground schools just give us the decoding tables and not much else? Each kind of code tells its own little story about what the air mass is doing, whats going on at that airfield, and how the weather will affect flight operations.

While traveling into Valdez, Alaska for the annual fly-in and STOL competition, a couple of planes were trying to hurry in before the airspace closed for aerobatic practice. A couple minutes after tower gave best forward speed instructions to a Lake amphibian (not known for great forward speed), the following exchange was heard: