I quickly silenced the alarm that began chirping at precisely 4 a.m. Even as a morning person, forcing myself from a cozy bed while my wife and kids continued to snooze contently required extra motivation at that hour. The reward was looming just outside the door and would unfold over the next 90 minutes. Dressed…
The Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-67A turbo-propeller engine. That’s a mouthful! However, for an experienced King Air pilot, the various versions of the iconic PT6 powerplant roll off the tongue with ease. Memorizing which version they operate and the shaft horsepower (SHP) and equivalent SHP (ESHP) ratings of it are mandatory for King Air pilots.…
Instrument procedure charts are not the sole domain of Jeppesen (now a Boeing company). Various governmental agencies and private companies have produced competing charts for decades. Yet, Jeppesen (Jepp) charts have long been the gold standard in Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) procedure publications for turbine aircraft operators the world over. They’ve always presented the detailed…
There is a premise among professional pilots that some FAA rules are intentionally vague and often open to interpretation in order to provide operational flexibility (within reason). For years, such has been the case with runway condition assessments and braking action reports. For example, most pilots who have operated under Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) Part…
In Part 1, the article left off with GPS failures that would affect both primary and secondary GPS units (such as failures related to shared antennas, identical software bugs, satellite outages, or the loss of shared power sources or cooling equipment). In such cases, being able to revert to “old school” forms of navigation can…
[Author’s Note: This two-part series will discuss a variety of navigation system failures and abnormalities, with ideas for training and handling them. While this installment will deal primarily with management of GPS abnormalities, the next installment will focus on the utilization of other navigation systems in GPS failure situations.] It was a blustery spring afternoon…
Complying with Mandatory Cold Temperature Altitude Corrections The alarm jolts me awake at 4:30 a.m. and I fumble in the dark to stifle its intrusive wailing. Dreading the scene, I stumble to the hotel room window, pull the curtains, and confirm the accuracy of last night’s forecast. Fresh snow blankets everything outside and gently falling…
In Part 1 of this article, we left off after completing the 53-mile drive across Glacier National Park (GNP) via the famous Going-to-the-Sun Road. We pick up the story along the final stretch of that most picturesque of drives. The final 10 miles of the Going-to-the-Sun Road follows the north shore of St. Mary Lake…
In cruise flight, we had reached the halfway point across the expansive width of Montana. The smoke that had been looming ahead, obscuring the western horizon in a thick and dingy haze, was now upon us and reduced forward visibility to almost nil. Peering out the side window and downward, the terrain features were visible…
Using Airline Safety Techniques in GA Operations A hearty eye-roll is often the first reaction when it is suggested that general aviation pilots should apply “airline techniques” to their operations to improve safety. First of all, GA is so multi-faceted that lumping so many types of aviation into such a catch-all term is ridiculous. How…