It’s time to pick up your airplane with its new modern avionics package. The plane has been at the avionics shop for 3 months getting upgraded from all the old steam gauges, the trusty Garmin 530W, and the ancient autopilot that didn’t fly a glideslope well for the last 10 years. You’ve seen pictures of …
We live in a day and age of amazing aviation technology. 20 years ago, GPS was brand new to the GA marketplace and Avidyne had a cutting edge full glass panel running on Windows ’98 technology. Garmin was still a year out from debuting the G1000. Fast forward to 2023. We have GPS approaches that …
Do LP Approaches Leave You Scratching Your Head? Read More »
I recently got the privilege to go on a tour of the Ft. Worth Center facility. It was with our annual fly in group with Texas Top Aviation. The event was in Dallas, which made it very easy to get to the Ft. Worth Center facility by the DFW Airport. Pulling into the parking lot …
I had someone tell me earlier this week that in order to best understand how to do a certain task, it helps to understand the logic behind how to do that task. I believe that is true in doing a lot of different tasks in the course of life, but especially true in learning how …
Lately, I’ve been hearing of a number of IFR clearances where the pilot receives a DME Fix off of a VOR Radial as part of the IFR routing, especially going back and forth between Austin and Dallas for low altitude airplanes. The initial panic sets in of, “Wait, what? You’re giving me a VOR radial? …
Garmin has lots of cool stuff that help pilots. One of those is their Flight Stream. A Flight Stream is a bluetooth connection between the airplane’s GPS unit (it works with any Garmin GPS, from a 430 all the way up through a Garmin G5000) and any portable device, either Apple (Foreflight or Garmin Pilot) …
In a previous Glass Panel Minute, I wrote about how to set up a hold in Foreflight. In this week’s Glass Panel Minute, I am continuing on with the holding theme as we are going to go through the steps to holding on the Garmin 530/430 units. The Garmin 530 and 430 units were revolutionary …
As a pilot, I hate to do math. Before Foreflight, it was a toss up of which was worse, doing math in my head or using the manual E6B. After Foreflight, my math and E6B skills have deteriorated somewhat. Even worse than doing math while pre-flight planning, is doing math in my head, in the …
For most GA instrument pilots, the event that causes the most surprise and stress is an unexpected missed approach. Don’t we all just make the automatic assumption when we listen to the METAR and hear the ceilings reported above the MDA or DA that we will see the runway? With that glass half full mindset, …
Unpublished holds are never enjoyable. When ATC gives a pilot holding instructions, it’s often times unexpected and typically, the pilot doesn’t have a whole lot of time to set up the hold. The two things that cause the most frustration are what the hold is supposed to look like and what entry is supposed to …
