Technique

Part 91, gives us lots of discretion when it comes to choosing an approach, deciding if it’s legal (and safe) to continue, and then...

The FAA and NASA have identified errors commonly made by pilots using advanced avionics. Each of the errors discussed below were unearthed during research...

It’s Saturday morning at 0730. Weather is VFR and a million, and most of the flight schools and weekend warriors are calling up Ground...

Too many pilots have died because they attempted instrument flight without a thorough working knowledge of their GPS navigators. Do you need to know...

Sequences don’t come much easier. A VFR Mooney and a VFR Cherokee both requested a practice RNAV approach. They were the same distance from...

Maybe it’s because the long Midwestern winter is not yet over, but the idea that approach procedures are like snowflakes comes to mind. From...

The first thing that might be on your mind is; “Aren’t there fewer rules if you are IFR?” Well, kind of. The main example...

(This is the first of a four-part series of articles in which contributing editor Fred Simonds will fully explore common, oft-fatal mistakes that we...

Schedules, climate, and other factors can limit our ability to maintain instrument currency in actual instrument conditions. The FAA allows us to maintain currency...

While most swans that we see have white feathers, black swans do exist. In 2007, Nassim Nicholas Taleb published a book titled Black Swan....

In 2015, the FAA began looking to rationalize ILS approaches. In this context, rationalize means cut. The following year, the FAA developed a cost/benefit quantitative model and conducted an analysis at about 2900 airports with few or no RNAV SIDs or STARs. The finished product was a plan to decommission Cat I ILS approaches at some of these airports between 2020-2030. Before a decision was reached, the project was shelved in 2017.

Things are getting busy approaching Trenton, Tennessee, Gibson County (KTGC), even though its not that bad. But the skies are grey enough to make you squint as you enter the overcast. Youve also entered, as youll soon find out, the murky realm of the regs. A cold crust of rime clings to the aluminum and probably the antennas, so youre anxious to get into that toasty hangar at TGC. Worse, the suns going down and the gyros acting up. So any shortcuts (safe and legal, of course) would be great right about now.