Safety

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The concept of learning to fly instruments is more appealing than the reality. Earning an IFR rating is hard work and, ultimately, tedious.

But forget concepts. Lets talk money.

Everyone knows that having an instrument rating lowers your insurance premium. Well put some numbers on that in a moment but consider something else.

If you want to buy kinds of high-performance airplanes or high limits on something more modest, its getting to the point where some insurance companies wont even look at you unless your certificate is stamped: Instrument Airplane. So whats it cost to earn an instrument rating these days? It varies according to how much experience youve go…

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Remember that pilot personality self-survey, with the half dozen psycho babble attitudes guaranteed to make a smoking hole? There was resigned, anti-authority, impulsive, macho and invulnerable.

We think a more accurate way to assess whether a pilot falls into one of these groups is to connect him to an EEG and see which button lights up following the words, Caution wake turbulence, departing 757.

Would your button be Resigned? Impulsive? Invulnerable? If you don’t spend your spare time tearing up gyros for fun, the prospect of an uncommanded flight upset might make your blood run cold.

A better-than-average grasp of airmanship may cause you to understand that t…

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For a couple of years before the General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994 (GARA) was enacted, almost every alphabet group involved in general aviation was beating the drum pushing for its passage.

Essential, we were told, as a means of keeping the greedy lawyers at bay while opening the doors for a new golden age of GA with more than 2000 new piston aircraft a year being promised by Cessna alone.

And so Congress passed GARA and the President signed it. The law of the land now generally cuts off the airframe and component manufacturers liability tail, meaning they cant be sued for personal injuries or death caused to GA aircraft occupants beyond 18 years fr…

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For those of us who trained at non-towered fields, getting instrument procedures down was a snap compared to communications issues.

Whadhesay? was second only in frequency to You want me to what? A variety of audio products over the years have attempted to address this problem with largely underwhelming results. Enter Comm1 Radio Simulator a CD-ROM-based product available in both VFR and IFR versions. For this review, we checked out the latter. With more than nine hours of training scenarios, the pilot working on the rating or looking for a comprehensive brush up should find just about everything he needs to develop a good ATC ear.

Comm1 starts out with comprehen…