Now don’t get me wrong, I assign no blame to anybody who’s been in a near-hit incident, you can take every precaution, and it can still happen. But that’s no reason to be fatalistic. There are lots of things you can do. But let me backtrack a bit. Once, long long ago, when I was [...]
A day out – in West Drayton! Many years ago, on the first leg of my qualifying cross-country, from Ipswich to Earls Colne, I was ‘temporarily’ unsure of my position. Recognising that I was heading rapidly in the direction of Stanstead, I decided that it was prudent to act sooner rather than later and asked [...]
Flying back from Jersey, about 5 miles from the coast one dark evening, just visual with the coast and the Isle of Wight, at about 3,000 feet, I was doing the usual; using every resource available in the aircraft to cross-check where I was and what was happening. GPS, agrees, sufficient satellites available, visually check [...]
Is That Supposed to be Flashing? TV celebrities like Jeremy Clarkson refer to light aircraft as Flying Washing machines. It gives the public the wrong impression and generally they don’t have the right impression anyway. You’ve been flying for too long to realise but your passengers, especially the new ones are full of questions and [...]
It was George Bernard Shaw (I think) who said, “America and Britain are the same in all respects, except of course their language”, or to put it another way “America and Britain two countries divided by a common language”, that one was probably Churchill. What you may ask am I talking about? I’m sure you [...]
Ever ditched an aircraft at sea? The wisdom is that you should land tail low and land parallel to the major swell. It’s covered in AIM 6-3-3, But this doesn’t cover what happens after the ‘landing’. In preparation for crossing that mighty stretch of water the English channel (which nonetheless is really cold – and [...]
General aviation pilots sometimes prefer flying at night. The air is less turbulent, usually (no heat from the sun to mess things up). Over populated areas there are numerous lights and roads to follow, some of which are easier to see at night than during the day. The air has fewer aircraft in it too, [...]
I’ve talked about how not to do passenger briefings in the past (See HTGYFF 5), but now let’s look at differing requirements of the two aviation authorities in the UK and the USA. In the UK in the ANO Article 53 we have the requirements laid out. Section (1) says “…reasonable steps…” to (1)(a) “before [...]
Have you ever been flying with an instructor, perhaps in a busy R/T environment and while you’re busy flying the plane, noticed that your instructor acknowledged ATC instructions with a single click? This is part of the speechless code. One click means “yes” or “acknowledge”. There is more to this code! Recently in the USA [...]
Generally speaking it’s a bad thing to have lots of distractions, but one of the skills a pilot must learn is to prioritise tasks and ‘time-slice’ them as required, keeping foremost those tasks that are the most important. Last week I was happy with my steep turns (so was my instructor). I was looking out, [...]
