Safety

The IFR Game

Last month, we reviewed the three big name IFR flight sims,Aviation Teachwares ELITE, ASAs On Top and Jeppesens FlitePro. Among these, no hands down winner emerged, at least for buyers shopping for a sim program for IFR brush up.

Each had distinct advantages and disadvantages, depending on your budget, training preferences and hardware. Hearing some favorable comments about some impressive game programs-thats right, games-we decided to take a look.

Despite being spring loaded to the dismissive position because ofthe toy connection, we came away convinced that, for some buyers, these are a solid, cost effective choice. Youll need a heavy duty machine, however, including a…

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Cyber Training

As with most things in life, the paper part of aviation training can be at best tedious and at worst onerous and just plain wrong. In a perfect world, all ground school instruction would be cheap, conducted by enthusiastic and qualified teachers at times and locations which don’t interfere with frenetic schedules and Santa Claus would be real.

In your dreams. Realizing this, scads of vendors have developed PC-based instructional software intended to provide a reasonable simulacrum of aviation nirvana. We don’t pretend we looked at all of them but what follows is tour-the-horizon view of some major players.

Simple Test Prep
At their most basic, this variety of ground…

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Keep Me Covered

Even if youre not one of those dotcom zillionaires, if you own a moderately expensive airplane, youve probably accumulated a nice tidy cache of wealth youd like to retain for your retirement years.

Owning an airplane, however, puts that wealth at risk. One of the biggest problems to face aircraft owners in recent years is the lack of higher limits of liability coverage beyond the run-of-the-mill million bucks, a sum thats chump change by modern insurance standards.

This is an expensive problem for pilots transitioning into bigger airplanes, but it plagues everyone who needs significant limits of liability, including people who have owned the same airplane for years.

Why It H…

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Keep Me Covered

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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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Surviving the Worst

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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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The World According to GARA

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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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Logbook

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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…

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