Training & Sims

Diamond Aircrafts single-engine turboprop prototype completed its maiden flight in January, in Austria. The DA50-JP7 seats seven and is powered by a fuel-efficient Ukrainian-built 465 hp AI-450S engine. Diamond plans to also offer a Tundra version of the aircraft, featuring beefed-up wheels and landing gear. Certification is expected in the second half of 2016. Also in January, Nextant Aerospace announced the first test flight of its remanufactured G90XT design. The project, which launched about a year ago, matches a refurbished King Air C90A with the new GE H75 engine, a Garmin G1000 cockpit, electronic engine controls, dual-zone air conditioning, and many more upgrades. Certification and first delivery are expected in the second quarter of this year.

Have any other nitpickers written about the illustration on page 15 of your November 2014 issue accompanying the Simulators Are Not Airplanes sidebar? The author of the very good article writes about how we developed our own VOR approach to a carrier in San Francisco Bay. And the illustration shows a small plane at 200 feet and 75 knots airspeed, headed straight for a carrier deck, apparently on final approach.

Previously, Ive described a practice of regular recurrent training in two articles: Proficiency in Pieces, in the July 2007 issue of IFR, and its follow-up, Proficiency in Pieces 2.0 in April, 2012. This program is a simulator-based recurrent training program in which you specify the minimums to which you want to train, and then design a specific training program tailored to your exact requirements, while assuring that your target performance meets or exceeds that prescribed in the regulations for your flying-Part 91 or even Part 135.

Im now writing about Proficiency in Pieces for a third time, partly to re-emphasize the idea. It has worked very well for me and others I know. More importantly, I want to fully stress what I have found to be, for me, a cornerstone of it that is missing in articles by others about their approach to personal sim training-the use of a qualified instructor to conduct the training.

Talking on the radio is, of course, only half of the equation. It goes without saying that if youre flying in new airspace and into a new airport, youve got to be actively listening for your call sign and related instructions. What may not be so obvious is maintaining that same level of attentiveness when youre flying in your own backyard.

I got a perfect illustration of this just a few weeks ago on a pretty VFR morning. I was training a new controller on Ground. We had a pair of aircraft waiting to cross the active runway: Piper Meridian 45J at Hotel, and Lear Jet 86C much further down the runway, holding short at Bravo. The Lear driver was a local, who flew out of our airport nearly every day.

Our main airport has several flight schools and they keep us air traffic controllers quite busy. Its easy to tell when they get a new batch of students-those first radio calls for VFR clearances and eventual taxi and takeoff are usually halting, uncertain affairs, dragging on as students parrot their instructors without truly understanding the lingo. It can be almost as painful for us as for the student.

Clumsy as those first steps may be, the subsequent journey will hopefully lead each student to true proficiency on the radios. Its not an easy road at times, especially once each advances into instrument training. The amount of radio communication and multitasking may be overwhelming at first.

Three days before Christmas in 1994 a Westwind landed in La Verne, Calif., east of Los Angeles, to drop off the mother of brothers who ran In-and-Out Burgers, a popular fast-food chain in California. They had been on a family trip and had their hunting gear on board. The Westwind took off for John Wayne Airport, a short ride south from La Verne. It crashed on short final to Runway 19R, diving vertically into a parking lot near the airport. It exploded and shot off ammunition in all directions. It had encountered a Boeing 757 wake.

I read with interest and obvious necessity for possible future application, your article on hypoxia, Get Your Mask On, in December, 2014.I fly a Malibu Mirage PA 46. Ive had several decompressions in the low 20s that were attributed to squat switch/pressure switch failures. Ive now added another immediate action to pressurization problems:

Even as a kid, I recognized the hyperbole in the old clich about my elders having it tough, walking to school two miles through heavy snow-uphill in both directions. So any time I start down the path of When I was younger… something inside me clicks and I quickly change gears. Until now.

Like the (un?)welcome holiday letter from distant edges of your family, its again time to see how the GA family has fared in our annual Safety-Takes-A-Holiday review. The rules are simple: Applicants need only do something stupid in an aircraft that results in financial harm but no loss of life. Qualifying lapses in aeronautical decision making (ADM) can occur in IMC or VMC, day or night, with or without a valid pilot certificate and in anything that flies-legally or not. Boneheaded stunts must be verified by the NTSB, so were using calamities from 2011, the most recent with NTSB-posted probable cause. No, we dont make this stuff up.

One of the most famous and tragic of fuel-exhaustion crashes occurred on Jan. 25, 1990. Upon arrival in the New York area after a flight from Bogot, the 707 was placed into a hold for an hour and 27 minutes due to fog at JFK. The pilots were not native English speakers and never used the actual word emergency in describing their fuel situation to ATC, using only minimum fuel instead and never stating their fuel state in minutes. During that time, they burned away all the fuel they needed to make Boston, their alternate.

When comparing a high-speed, cruise-power descent against a cruise-speed, reduced-power descent, there are a surprisingly large number of variables in the equation, all pulling in different directions.

Maybe its the looming specter of my 25th high-school reunion thats got me worrying about getting fat and sloppy. Living in the land where donuts and coffee are staple foods, Ive been passing on the former while muttering renewed resolutions about spending more time at the gym.