More than a supplier of equipment for aviators, Sporty’s (www.sportys.com) has long had a significant presence in the flight training world, including its own flight school, Sporty’s Academy. Last October, Sporty’s announced an across the board upgrade for its more than 20 aviation courses. We’ve used its courses to upgrade our skills as we’ll as […]
We’re good pilots—by and large. Getting our certificates and ratings wasn’t easy. Face it, we sweat blood training to master the skills, knowledge and judgment needed to cause an inanimate object to rise into an often unforgiving sky and return to the planet not only safely, but with some degree of panache. In the process […]
Specifically, on the form there’s Item 10 Equipment and Item 18 Other Information. Item 10 has two parts: avionics and surveillance capability. What makes the codes confusing is that unlike the older domestic flight plan form that used installed equipment, the ICAO flight plan goes a step further. The codes not only could refer to installed equipment (e.g., “D” for DME), but also capability (“B” for LPV) and approvals (“W” for RVSM Approved-reduced vertical separation minima, above FL290) and at times, combinations such as “Y” for VHF with 8.33 kHz channel spacing capability. Got that?
The only downside to not getting the FR endorsement on the first time you fly with a CFI is that if your 24 months has expired since your last FR, you can’t fly as PIC (that includes solo) until you get a new endorsement. Um, that’s also a very good reason for not putting your FR off until the last moment as the realities of aviation karma include delivering lousy weather for the one day you have available for the FR flight before it expires.
It’s aviation’s Everest: the highest rating, the toughest to obtain and necessary to have to fly in the Part 121 airline world, and even in some portions of the Part 135 air taxi world. In reality, if you want to fly for a living, the chances are almost unity that you’ll need to hold an Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) rating to do so. Even in the corporate world, operating under Part 91, insurers want the pilots who haul mega-buck executives around to hold aviation’s Ph.D.
Course content is broken into nine sections, each of which begins with an audiovisual presentation. The presentations-slides with a voice-over-provide an overview of the section topic and generally run between 5 and 15 minutes. There is a note-taking function available during the presentations. Each presentation is followed by a 10-question true/false study quiz, which serves as a pretty good indicator of how much studying you need to be doing on the topic. Answers are reviewed after completion with explanations presented below the questions. Section reviews emphasize terminology, which might be quite useful for a pilot who has been away from the industry for a while, but less so for someone still comfortable with pilot lingo.
Our, admittedly arbitrary, definition of “accelerated private pilot course” is one that is completed within a month. We surveyed a number of flight schools that offer such courses and spoke with some pilots who had completed one. Our conclusion is that, for a person who has the time, money and self-discipline to eat, sleep and breathe flying 8-12 hours a day for two or three weeks, an accelerated course is a better way to obtain a private pilot certificate than flying intermittently over the course of a few months or a year and costs about the same.
Any owner with the financial wherewithal to step into the world of aircraft with engines that go whoosh is smart enough to immediately talk the idea over with his or her insurance broker. In addition to getting a ballpark estimate for the cost to insure a used King Air, Citation Mustang or new HondaJet, one of the first things the prospective owner will hear from the broker is that any insurer is going to require upgrade training at a facility approved by the insurer.
Sooner or later your used aircraft search will find an airplane thats suffered a so-called hard landing. While thats the sugarcoated word for damage history, in some circumstances this is hardly a deal breaker. Other times, its best to walk away, especially if the damage has gone unnoticed or left unrepaired.
Every few years we take a close look at the U.S. general aviation insurance market. During the research we speak with underwriters and brokers to get a feeling for what changes they see, what problems they are having and what they anticipate coming down the track for those of us who write premium checks. …
A favorite topic of post-flight barroom chatter is anguish over the price of new airplanes and the heartfelt conviction the industry could build a $40,000 airplane if it adopted automotive manufacturing methods. If youre a believer in that, your ship has arrived in the new Vashon Ranger LSA.But it doesnt cost $40,000, its $100,000 and it may be a push to deliver on that. Against the limits of low volume, the Ranger at that price is still a high-value proposition and the company-an offshoot of Dynon Avionics-sees the Ranger as potentially nothing less than a modern iteration of the Cessna 150, with a dash of modest adventure flyer thrown in.
Thinking rating, toughest rating, necessary rating, unnecessary rating-all descriptions weve heard of the instrument rating. No matter what you call it, the instrument ticket is virtually essential if you wish to fly professionally or, in our opinion, get the most out of ownership of a GA airplane designed for traveling.
