Lee Smith is an ATP-rated pilot, flight instructor, and software engineer in Maryland who enjoys bridging the gap between flight operations and technology. With a background in corporate aviation and over a decade of experience supporting flight procedure design and analysis, he brings both cockpit experience and engineering insights to complex IFR topics. Lee's work has appeared in IFR Magazine, IFR Refresher, Aviation Safety, and AOPA. He also writes The Logical Skies available at LogicalSkies.Substack.com exploring why the aviation system works the way it does.
Continuous descent final approaches have been a staple in professional flying for a long time. They have proven safer and easier to manage than the old-fashioned, dive-and-drive method of flying a non-precision approach. This technique manifests in general aviation avionics as the +V advisory glidepaths for non-precision approaches.
In this month’s challenge, you’ll discover the difference between approved vertical guidance and advisory vertical guidance—and what can happen if you follow advisory vertical guidance below MDA.
In this month’s challenge, a short winter flight in Vermont from Rutland (KRUT) to Burlington (KBTV) packs in an IFR procedures workout. It’s also a first-hand look at what cold temperatures can do to your altimeter (and what to do about it).
For this inaugural Sim Challenge let’s just make it a nice short flight from White Plains, New York (KHPN) to Danbury, Connecticut (KDXR). At 21nm from start to finish, there isn’t much time for things to go wrong, or much time at all, really. And therein lies the rub. We typically estimate the subjective challenge of a flight to be proportional with the length of the flight. When it comes to weather flying, performance considerations, and fatigue management, there’s certainly something to be said for that.
