Practial IFR: Have a Speed-to-Fly for Emergencies in IMC

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3 Comments
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.

Practical IFR: Behold the Power of Uninterrupted Descents

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2 Comments
 “Descend and maintain” is such a staple of IFR communications…

Practical IFR: Decision Time

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1 Comment
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.

Practical IFR: Understanding the Transitions

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6 Comments
Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport (KBZN) RNAV and ILS…

Practical IFR: Departure Alternates

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5 Comments
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.

Practical IFR: Off-Route Thinking

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4 Comments
Student pilots learn, by rote, the visibility differences between…

Practical IFR: Don’t Disable. Revert!

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12 Comments
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.

Our Faith in NEXRAD

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1 Comment
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.
g1000

Practical IFR: Making Avionics Sing

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3 Comments
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.

Practical IFR: Does Your Approach Use the Wrong Minimums?

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6 Comments
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.