Weather

Unless your flying is limited to local sightseeing in good weather, chances are you’ve used winds aloft charts at some point. For many commercial...

Category I ILS approaches, long our low-weather mainstay, offer us minimums as low as 200 feet above the touchdown zone with RVR 1800 feet...

When the jet age arrived in 1959, little was known about wind shear. Aviation was focused on thunderstorm avoidance. In Joseph George’s compilation of...

There’s an old Buddhist saying that the fool sees only the form, while the enlightened person sees the essence. It’s strange to think that...

For some, flying is just braving the traffic pattern or short, local flights. But serious long-distance flying or commercial operations will eventually bring you...

Rime ice giving your Cessna 210 a quarter-inch coating was the inbound surprise to Mission Field in Livingston, Montana. As one accustomed to life...

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

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...

(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...

Skew-Ts aren’t the sort of thing you learn about in ground school, but I’m quite outspoken about how important they are to understanding the...

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.

During low index patterns, these frontal systems can be quite deep, even extending into southern California, producing cold-core lows and showery weather. This also tends to allow moisture to circumvent the Sierra Nevadas through the Mojave Desert into the Great Basin, causing snowstorms eastward into Utah. These deep storm systems are particularly favored during El Nio years (the pattern this winter is neither El Nio nor La Nia), but they can occur in any season and theyll definitely have impacts on your flying plans.