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.
One refinement that rarely gets taught is adjusting best glide speed (Vbg) for changes in weight and wind. In a glider, if you’re heading back to the airport with a headwind, you can’t just open the throttle to make up for lost groundspeed. Instead, you pitch down to speed up. A lot. In fact, you might add 20 knots to your best glide (L/Dmax) speed to counter a 20-knot headwind.
“Descend and maintain” is such a staple of IFR communications it might as well be a single word. Yet there are times when that’s the last thing you want to do. Maybe those clouds are bumpy and you have the family on board. Maybe they’re icy and you need to minimize your exposure. Maybe you just like […]
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.
