My name is

Alec Myers

I’m an experienced flight instructor in Toronto.

Here’s my blog.

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Photo by Blair Fraser on Unsplash

My sparge pump indicator isn’t working. Am I legal to fly?

Every aircraft owner has bits of equipment on their aircraft that stop working on occasions. And few aircraft owners have the resources, time, or availability always to be able to fix whatever isn’t working before the next time they want to fly. How then can an aircraft owner tell if their aircraft is legal to fly when they know some piece of equipment isn’t working?



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Photo by Jordan McQueen on Unsplash

Short & soft field takeoffs and the 70/50 rule

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.


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Photo by Echo Grid on Unsplash

Lost communications

I was talking recently with a friend and fellow aircraft owner, and he was telling me his preparations for flying out of the Island (CYTZ) and what he’d do if his radios gave up in flight and he was unable to contact the control tower to get permission to re-enter the control zone or a clearance to land.


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Aerodynamics by numbers

A friend asked me to estimate the force exerted by the tailplane on the fuselage of a Cessna 182, this week. In the course of answering I located and/or worked out some information that might interest you.





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Photo by Eve Liu on Unsplash

What does it mean to “learn to fly”?

When people ask me, socially, what I do, I tell them I teach people to fly. Most of the time I get two replies, one after the other. First, “wow, that’s so cool. (People are very kind, aren’t they?) And then, very often, “I’ve always wanted to learn to fly … how much does it cost?