This past weekend I logged 1.4 hours of Pilot In Command time. This isn’t new — I’ve got over 300 hours under my belt — but for the last six months, there’s been some significant doubt about whether I would ever be able to fly again thanks to a 20 year old ADHD diagnosis that was holding up my medical. I didn’t have a clear guide to what would happen or how to navigate this process, so I wanted to write up my experience to help others who might be going through a similar ordeal.
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Four years ago I was climbing out of an un-towered airport into IFR conditions when my radios decided to stop transmitting. Thankfully I was still able to hear ATC talking to me and use my transponder to respond, but that event was scary enough to make me never want to relive it again. I immediately went out and bought a handheld backup radio: the Yaesu FTA550.
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Houston is a busy place, with two large international airfields and a remarkable amount of air traffic. But nestled on the north end of the Class Bravo airspace is the Conroe airfield, a towered airport with two runways that offers an excellent destination for anyone within a few hundred nautical miles and a bit of an appetite.
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One of the best parts about getting your pilot’s license is taking friends out and sharing the experience of flight. And when passengers are involved there are a whole new set of requirements that you need to satisfy as Pilot In Command. One of those is a safety briefing, and just like at the major airlines I find it easier and safer to do it through a pre-printed card.
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Flying in warm and sunny weather is a pleasure. Well, usually — down here in Texas things can get a mite warm, but climbing a little higher and cracking a window is an acceptable solution. Things aren’t quite as simple when the weather turns cold. Over the years I’ve learned that there are three things that every pilot should have when flying in cold weather that could make things easier or even save your life.
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An iPad or other tablet is pretty much a requirement for modern pilots. The amount of information it provides is indispensable whether you’re doing some work in the pattern or blasting off on a cross country flight. But how do you keep your tablet visible and useful in the cockpit? MyGoFlight offers a variety of mounting options for their tablet mounting system, one of which is their glare shield mount.
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My girlfriend and I had just spent a week in Cape Cod visiting friends and family. It was our first long distance flight in my Piper Cherokee, and things had gone fairly smoothly so far. I had made the trip the previous year and learned from the mistakes I made, ensuring that this time I brought a tarp to cover the airplane and prevent the water logged radios that plagued me on the last trip. But on the flight back things were about to get much more interesting.
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Not everyone has the cash to buy and maintain an airplane. For those of us who just need to borrow a set of wings every couple weeks it makes more sense to rent our aircraft by the hour. But how exactly does that whole process work? Let me try and break it down for you.
Read MoreI just recently checked something off my bucket list that I had honestly thought would take me a lot more time to get around to doing, namely acting as Pilot In Command for an aircraft flying around the Alps during the winter. This was an amazing experience, and something that every pilot should try to do at least once in their life, in my opinion. I’ll try to document as much of the experience as possible here in a couple articles to hopefully make it a little easier to check this box for y’all as well.
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There are some products that are so pervasive and ubiquitous within a community that you almost can’t picture a situation without them. Graphic designers and Macbooks. Hipsters and rolled up sleeves on a buttoned down shirt. Pilots and David Clark headsets. But just because something is common doesn’t mean that it’s the best idea.
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