Ok. In the 172M POH, Cessna says that an "average" pilot can land with a 15 knot direct crosswind. So, according to Cessna, if you can't land a 172 with 15 knots of direct crosswind, you are a "below average" pilot. Somewhere in the "below average" range is "borderline incompetent". I just landed, a...

Rapco?

Generally you try to make illusions look best
for show center, where the highest concentrations
of people are.

If you are thousands of feet either side of that,
along the crowd line, it will not look as impressive.

unrealistic for the average PPL You're probably right. It all comes down to motivation, in my experience. If someone is happy being borderline incompetent, well, not much is going to change. What I like to see is someone really unhappy when their performance is less than stellar. If someone is moti...

Glad you fixed the problem ... I know the AME's here like to make fun of me because I like the airplane and engine to be clean as a whistle, inside and out, but sometimes it's not just a fetish. http://i.imgur.com/a9t45F5.jpg For Lycoming, see SB 388C and SI 1425A. PS Dental floss with good tensile ...

Actually, pilots have to have a decent working ability of arithmetic, not mathematics. If you can add, subtract, multiply and divide, you're our boy. Example: -- cut -- You are flying to an airport 172 nm away. You have 25 gallons on board. You are leaned out to 11 gallons per hour. Your true airspe...

CPL holders ... neither could satisfactorily land the airplane. neither could maintain a speed when asked neither seemed to know what the rudder was for neither of them could fly a coordinated turn I know. Button pushers. That's what everyone wants to be, these days. Zero interest in learning what ...

not having an AOA instrument in any airplane i've ever flown might have made it difficult to teach That's certainly a huge problem - we can't look at a nice (dual-indicating) gauge and see the AOA for each wing. As a result, over the decades people have developed all sorts of approximate rules, to ...

We're still talking about turning back after an engine failure, right? No. I am trying (in vain) to try to teach people, by using extreme examples, that bank angle IS NOT EVIL as you have been taught, and as your instructors have been taught, and as their instructor were taught. Blind adherence to ...

What makes you turn In my example of an 80 degree banked turn with zero G (and hence zero stall speed) you have unloaded the wing, and you allow the aircraft to continue ballistically as determined by it's previous maneuvering. The aircraft has mass, and thus it has momentum and kinetic energy. How...

I get your point, SSU. I fly about 300 flights a year, which isn't a whole lot, but it's enough to keep the rust off. What I find is a great introductory maneuver is the wingover, which is a required maneuver on the FAA COMM checkride. At the apogee, they are at a steep bank angle with very little a...

Ok. I'll take another swing at it. You know what "G" is, right? Sitting in your chair, you're experiencing +1G. In a steep turn, you can experience +2, +3 or +4G. You can also decrease the G, too, by gently pushing forward on the control column. Here's the one fact I want you to learn: Vs(G) = sqrt(...

I was taught that maneuver by a Class 1 Aerobatics instructor You are lucky to have received some competent flight instruction. It is getting rarer and rarer, these days. I thought you had figured it out on your own, which impressed the hell out of me :-) I learned to do the turnback from a Profess...

See "Tale of Two Comanches". Despite all the obfuscation, avoidance of unintentional stall/spin is the most important objective of any forced approach. It's really very simple: If you accidentally stall/spin during a forced approach, you will almost certainly die. If you do not stall/spin during a f...

Anytime you're going 100 mph or are 100 feet off the ground, you have enough kinetic or potential energy to kill you. It's odd how people think some maneuvers are more Politically Correct than others. A doctor near me, tried to fly an vectored ILS one night. He and his pax are dead now. But people a...

I didn't use best glide for my real forced approach. I cranked it until the stall horn went off to turn back to the field and pitched for a normal power off approach speed. I made the field

Sharp flying, IFP! Congratulations on
really learning to fly, despite what you
were taught.

Nope.

A good airshow is all about creating
crowd-pleasing illusions:



If you can make the crowd gasp, while
doing something pretty boring, you know
you are doing it right!

Amazing! Your wife will watch Monty Python with you? re: symptoms of carb ice .... Back in the day when we had floppy disks, they had this red light that would go out, 2 seconds after it stopped writing to the disc. I told people they could actually take the floppy disk out 2 seconds before the ligh...

On the subject of carb heat. Someone is going to start whining about the importance of carb heat, any time now. If you've actually choked up the carburetor with ice to the point that the engine is windmilling, putting on the carb heat is like closing the barn door after the horses have left. It migh...