Jeff Van West is PilotWorkshops’ Creative Director with the primary responsibility for managing the development and creation of the company’s pilot proficiency training programs, including its flagship IFR and VFR Mastery programs.
For 19 years, Jeff ran many noteworthy aviation media projects with his own firm, Van West Communications, including magazines, books, videos and live seminars. Jeff previously served as editor-in-chief of IFR Magazine and co-editor of Aviation Consumer, and his work appears in AOPA Pilot, Flight Training Magazine, Plane and Pilot, and AVweb. He’s an experienced CFII/MEI with ratings for single- and multi-engine airplanes, seaplanes, and gliders. Jeff was the creator of the first pilot transition program for new Cirrus aircraft.
Some decisions don’t allow the luxury of contemplation. Every instrument pilot knows at least one of these decisions in the depths of his or her cloud-flying bones: the missed approach. Making a decision while still descending and a mere 200 feet above the ground (lower for Cat II+) only works because the decision is binary. You see the expected environment and continue—or you don’t and you climb away.
Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport (KBZN) RNAV and ILS 12 In a world of vectors and magenta lines, we rarely sweat the details of transition routes for instrument approaches. Follow the controller’s instructions and the GPS flight plan. What could go wrong? Not much when you’re in radar contact and the navigator is working. However, both […]
A departure alternate is an airport and approach you’ll fly if trouble finds you seconds after you enter the clouds. These are required for many commercial operations if the conditions make an IFR return to the departure airport unlikely or impossible. They’re not required for GA, but you should consider making them part of your standard IFR planning.
Student pilots learn, by rote, the visibility differences between controlled and uncontrolled airspace—and then completely forget about it. It makes little practical difference to most pilots who spend almost all their time in controlled airspace (remember, Class “E” stands for “everywhere.”), even though most of that time isn’t under ATC control. The concept makes much […]
What should you do when the autopilot fails to capture the glideslope or turns right when you expected left? You should disengage the autopilot and hand-fly, right? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Think about this objectively for a moment. Right at a critical moment in the approach, you’ve been hit with a surprise, so you double your workload by throwing out one of your best IFR tools. You do it right when a precise flying action is required.
The takeaway is that all such information should be considered an educated opinion, not a fact. It’s data that’s been collected from various sources, processed automatically, checked by a human briefly, and then pumped out to our cockpits. It’s neither completely right nor completely wrong.
I’m an unabashed geek when it comes to avionics. My flight instruction career has lived in parallel to one in technical education and writing. It also started less than a year after Garmin introduced the original GNS 430, so maybe it was destiny that my niche would be avionics training and IFR training.
It’s visibility that controls whether we can land or not. While on paper that’s a number we have or don’t, it’s not so simple in real life. We must make a rapid judgment call—sometimes based on a glance—as to whether we’re getting enough visual information to call the flight visibility half a mile. Or three-quarters of a mile, or two miles, or whatever.
You haven’t been cleared for the approach, but the needle is alive and time is short. Learn how to handle this tricky IFR moment without risking a violation—or a missed approach.
The two best things you can do are making practice a habit and upping the stakes. The first part is pretty simple: Set a recurring day, say the second Saturday of each month, when you and a friend or two go bore holes in the IFR system for practice. Three people are better because two get to watch while one flies, and there’s still a party if one of the gang must take a day off.
