Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently – is what determines how fast a student learns to pilot an airplane? Some students seem to race through the syllabus, picking up skills and moving on through the different stages without a backward glance. For others their progress is more measured.
It’s a funny how things go in threes, isn’t it? Today’s “three” was a trio of enquiries all nearly identical: “Hi Alec, I have an established job in a professional field, I’m looking at my future behind a desk for the next thirty years, and I think I want to be an airline pilot instead.
When you get in your small airplane in Canada to go flying there are a bunch of requirements that it has to meet in order for the flight to be legal. The rules are scattered through the Canadian Aviation Regulations, so I thought it might be useful to gather together as many of them as… Read more »
All recent student pilots will be familiar with the difficulties of the dreaded checklist – that innocuous spiral-bound booklet or laminated sheet of terse instructions and checks whose contents torture and haunt the start of every flight…
THOSE of us who have been operating flight training flights from the Island for a while know the last year and a half has been a different experience to the years prior. As far as real estate goes, CYTZ is a very small airport and Porter Airlines took up most of the room. So those… Read more »
In this post I want to talk about the aircraft electrical system, and some basic knowledge that a pilot should have about it. A student pilot entrusted with responsibility for a single engine piston-powered training aircraft such as the Grob should know it has two sources of electrical power: the alternator, which is driven by… Read more »
If you do an amount of cross-country VFR flying eventually you’ll come across a situation where your airplane is headed what looks like right at a bunch of clouds. It can be helpful to know a few minutes in advance, whether, when you reach the clouds they’re going to be at your altitude, or whether you’re going to pass above or below them.
Today I added some survival equipment to the baggage compartment of FLYO.
Scenario: You’re flying a series of touch-and-go’s for practice, and the Tower controller gets on the radio: “Unable touch-and-go due to wake turbulence, Dash 8 departed thirty seconds ago, what are your intentions?”
What does this mean, and how should you reply?
Your small airplane has landed in a grass strip, or field, or other confined area, one with which you’re not familiar. There’s a runway of sorts, but it’s muddy in places, or the grass hasn’t been cut for a while. Also it’s not level, like the tarmac runways you’re used to. There’s a bit of an up-slope here, and it definitely slopes down over there.