Weather

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:

Most pilots and aviation journalists think BasicMed is a win. For many it is. But, if you dig beneath the covers you might conclude its not a win for you. Behind closed doors Ive been equivocal about BasicMed, but weve been generally favorable in print. I personally like the ever-cautious wait-and-see approach. Waiting and seeing, combined with a letter from James Shepard (see Readback), lead me to conclude that perhaps BasicMed isnt the big win most of us hoped and thought it would be.

One Aviation flew its Eclipse jet with a new wing, in August. The testing is the first step in developing a new version of the jet, EA700. The EA700 will be a larger version of the original 500/550 jet, with a bigger wing, bigger engines, and a fuselage extended 14 inches. The more powerful EA700 will be able to climb direct to 43,000 feet and extend its range to 1500 NM. It will also boost performance for high and hot airports. The flight test lasted about 80 minutes and all parameters were met, the company said. The aircraft felt very solid, a testament to the engineering and build teams, said test pilot Jerry Chambers.

I am pretty much all in with all the latest wizbangs-syn vis, AOA, MFD, ADS-B In etc. in my V-35B, plus of course the great PFD. All this works perfectly with my legacy autopilot and it will take me wherever I want.I too discovered that I was really getting sloppy with my hand flying in challenging conditions and resolved to make letting George fly the exception. Sometimes we split the route where I fly out George flies back. I like flying the airplane and becoming more aware of all that I have on display in front of me, but it does take more effort and concentration.

Each year I pore through between 1500 and 2000 NTSB accident/incident reports searching for bonehead pilots who heed the sirens call of stupidity and invent creative means of destroying a variety of aircraft without killing anyone. To walk the Stupid Pilot Tricks red carpet requires a willingness to ignore good airmanship and, frankly, dance with fools.

In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. The American psyche was troubled by the potential of this technological second place. This planted the seeds of one of Americas greatest military and technological innovations-GPS.

About the only thing I personally know about Lincoln, Nebraska is a Dennys off Interstate 80. In my moderately delinquent youth, I helped a friend who couldnt afford a move from Connecticut to Colorado by renting a truck for local use one Thursday afternoon, disconnecting the odometer, round tripping across two time zones, and reconnecting it in time to log 30 miles before returning the truck Monday morning.

In our last issue, we talked about the building blocks of weather radar-how it was developed, the basics of radio waves, problems with radar sampling, and the important differences between composite and base reflectivity. If you havent read that, I highly recommend you do so to get a good grounding in radar fundamentals. In this issue well take that knowledge and teach you a bit about interpretation.

This August, just before the solar eclipse passed through the U.S., pilots from all over Utah flocked to southern Idaho into the zone of totality. The tower at Ogden Airport was busy, with a single controller handling tower and ground frequencies. As I taxied to the departure runway, several pilots called for clearances.