In three months, I’ll fly from Frankfurt to Jacksonville to start a great flying adventure together with Jason Schappert, the editor of www.m0a.com. We launched the Flying Across America project to promote General Aviation. We will fly from Florida to California and back in Jason’s Cessna 150 to meet as many aviation enthusiasts as possible and preach for positive values associated with General Aviation: solidarity and friendship, self-development, service to the community, and fun.

Our route is already defined, we’ll keep south of the Rocky Mountains, and stop at airports where we found friends and local support. We also want to show that aviation is not reserved to the affluent, and that it’s a great community. We do our best to get some media coverage, and several fellow bloggers already posted about us, like Dan, from www.av8rdan.com. The guys from mytransponder.com and Friends Of Aviation also support our project, together with other patrons and partners. We need all possible support to turn our flight into a great event, from help with funding to media relays and local supporters.

If you live close to our route and want to help, don’t hesitate to contact me via this blog of via our contact page.

We fund ourselves as much as we can, but we’re also selling t-shirts, mousepads and glassware from our online store. You can also support us directly by buying miles from our website. Any extra cent will be donated to aviation related charities, and we hope to donate a lot. We plan a book, and may be a DVD. And naturally, we’ll post a lot on our blog.

So far, we’ve enough funds for the flight from Florida to California, and my flight ticket to Jacksonville and back is paid for. We’ve been invited overnight at different places and this will reduce the costs, but we still need more support. We need your help to spread the word, and make possible for us to reach a wider audience, so don’t hesitate to talk about this project around you. Join us to make General Aviation a bit better!

Learning to fly was a great experience, but if I had to do it again I would probably do some things differently. Some because I have more experience now, others because aviation changed since I got my license. So if you’re about to start your flight training, here are a couple of tips for you.

I learned to fly in Geneva, Switzerland, and airport with a 4 kilometers long runway. The VFR pattern was typically 7 minutes long in a basic trainer. On one hand, this gave some time to my Instructor to de-brief the previous touch-and-go while flying on downwind. On the other hand, compared to a 4 minutes circuit, this makes a significant difference. I soloed after 140 landings, mostly done flying in the pattern. A three minutes difference means 7 hours more with a 7 minutes circuit than with a 4 minutes one… Because I learned to fly at a controlled airport, working with ATC is not a problem for me, unlike for some pilots who are always a bit afraid to talk with a tower controller and say wrong things.

When I started to learn to fly, Light Sport Aircrafts (LSA), or Ultra Light Aircraft as we call them in Europe were not even existing. The first aircraft type I flew in was the AS-202 Bravo, and other typical basic trainers were Cessnas 152 or 172 and Piper Warriors. Now, the Aero-Club in Geneva uses Tecnam P2002 JF for basic training. They are registered as standard aircraft but could also enter the LSA category. They sip much less fuel, reducing the flight training costs. Building some flight experience on an LSA or on a classical aircraft makes not a lot of difference in terms of airmanship, flight preparation, and basic handling.

If you’re about to start with your flight training, you probably have to make a decision between classical instrumentation or computerized, glass-cockpits. I’m personally an aficionado of glass-cockpits, but this is certainly not new to usual readers of this blog. There was a great discussion on the “Glass cockpit or traditional gauges for primary training” post on www.askacfi.com.

All European pilots are also faced-up with a classical question: learn to fly in Europe or in the USA. Taking a six weeks leave and get a pilot certificate in Florida or Arizona is possible, and can be less expensive than doing it in Europe. Even with price of a transatlantic flight and accommodation, it could be less expensive. When I started to take flight lessons, my personal context was not compatible with such a trip, and the US Dollar was 20% more expensive.

What would you change if you had to go through primary flight training ? Do yo also have tips for newcomers ?

There are tons of good aviation blogs out there, I read lots of them and continue discover new ones. But today I’d like to know which ones you read and like.

There are two rules for this month’s poll:

1. You can’t vote for plasticpilot.net – We already know you like it, don’t we ?
2. If you’re an aviation blogger yourself, you can’t vote for your own blog. Link to it is fine, but voting for oneself is a bit too… selfish.

So, let us know which other aviation blog you like!

This is a guest post from my good friend Jason Schappert, who just published his new “Learn to Fly – Pass Your Private Pilot Checkride” book…

Make Your Private Pilot Checkride A Breeze

With the release of his newest book Learn to Fly – Pass Your Private Pilot Checkride Jason Schappert has been creating quite the buzz and shares with us some tips from the book on how to make your private pilot checkride a breeze.

The checkride is one of the most anticipated and, at the same time, the most dreaded moments in any student pilot’s career. Your checkride represents the pinnacle of all that you have been working for; it is the culmination of your entire private pilot training where an examiner finally grades and judges whether or not you are fully capable of flying that aircraft.

For most pilots, this is the point of no return and would understandly cause a lot of anxieties on their part. However, it is also important that you learn to overcome these anxieties so that you can truly ensure that you pass your checkride. Nerves will get you nowhere and instead make you jittery come test day.

Fortunately, there are ways that one can make his private pilot checkride a breeze.

Get Everything Ready Beforehand

Preparing to fly is just like every task that we do in this world. You would need to prepare a few things. These things would include the necessary tools such as books and charts. When you’ve prepared enough, you’d be pretty certain that you would go through the checkride quickly and it would all be over before you know it. If you’re not prepared, on the other hand, you’re simply setting yourself up for failure. Be prepared! Set everything up the night before.

Use your Checklist

There are some student pilots who, after accumulating enough experience in flying, would conveniently neglect to refer to the checklist. While this is testimony to their skill, it would also be prudent for you to look at the checklist and ascertain that what you are doing is right. You can consider the checklist as your notes in an open-note exam. Contrary to what most pilots might think, instructors would actually prefer you double check the checklist as compared to those who seemingly “know it all.”

Enjoy the Ride

Last but not the least, enjoy the ride! Don’t over think things! You’ve trained and studied for hours! Your instructor wouldn’t have signed you off if he or she hadn’t thought you were ready.

Need help studying for your Private Pilot Checkride? Jason’s book is a great place to look. Written in question and answer format it allows you to ask yourself questions and read the right answers. All questions are REAL examiner questions that Jason has collected over the years. The book features full color diagrams and is available in Ebook, audiobook, and paperback formats!

Click here to visit Schapp Aviation – MzeroA.com, grab yourself a copy and Pass Your Private Pilot Checkride!

Rush…

Rushing through flight preparation is a great way to ruin a good flight. I saw once a student pilot leaving to a remote, exciting airport, and he felt great about it. When I saw him back couple of hours later I asked how it was, and the answer was quite sad: closed! Too bad this guy missed the NOTAM.

Flight preparation represents a significant part of the time spent around aircraft. Not having good weather and NOTAM information, or not having a clear navigation plan is a great way to waste a flight. Even on short flights, a plan B is a must.

Rushing through the pre-flight checks is also a good for getting in trouble. An open fuel cap, or a covered pitot tube are not that hard to spot but can lead to lot of problems. There is at least one registered case of a pilot forgetting to remove chokes, and then asking his passenger and fellow pilot to remove them with the prop running. A fatal error, literally speaking.

Don’t pay attention…

Enjoying a flight and chatting with your passengers in flight is great, and sharing the passion is cool. Not paying attention to engine instruments is also a great way not to detect possible engine problems soon enough. FADECs constantly monitoring all parameters are great. Engine problems are not always sudden, but not monitoring the instruments does not help to identify them. Fuel management is also a good thing to ignore if you want to get your share of shame. Fuel does not massively vanish from the tanks (except if you first forgot to close a fuel cap, see above…) and there is no reason to experience fuel starvation in a perfectly working aircraft.

Weather also evolves quickly and not maintaining a constant watch is good for getting trapped in bad situations. Restricted airspace evolves much less dynamically than weather, but aircraft move rapidly. Not paying attention to the navigation, missing a turning point or drifting away of the planned course and then violate some airspace is also a good way to get your local aviation authority looking at you very closely. And they will pay a lot of attention to you.

Continue…

Turning around can be frustrating, but continuing can be much worse. Continue a VFR flight in marginal conditions, and its cousin continue a VFR flight in IMC. For IFR pilots in light aircraft, continue in icing conditions. Continue to fly straight ahead even if you’re no longer sure of your position. Continue to descend because clouds get lower, even over rough terrain. Continue to descend along the ILS, because the lights are almost in sight. Continue on this low fuel conditions, because the winds can’t be that bad for the remaining time. Continue on this rough engine, because your homebase is the airport coming after the next one.

A good pilot must be patient, remain attentive, and know when to say stop and divert.

Open the door
At first, the crew members will do all what they can to prevent you to do that. This could be painful. And if you ever achieve it, there’s a lot of cold air out there, at lower pressure. You will be sucked out of the aircraft and deep-frozen before realizing you’ll be dying.

Leave your shoes in the toilet
As a general rule, getting off your shoes is not a good thing to do. Doing that in the toilet is even worse. If you do it anyway and someone asks you, make sure you answer does not contain the word “bomb”. Some guys spent days at FBI premises for saying that as a “joke”.

Get drunk
Getting drunk on board is not a bad idea by itself, but what you could do after that could be really really bad for you. If a flight attendant says “no” when you ask for a drink, you’d better to accept it as the good answer. Flights get frequently diverted because of unruly passengers, and you don’t want to be one of them.

Engage into inappropriate activities, particularly with flight attendants
Do you really think flights attendants don’t see when passengers play nasty games, be in in the toilets (anyway, good luck, except if you’re a very little person), or on their seats. Flight attendants themselves have other things to do, and remember, they travel in groups.

Look at “Airplane!” (a.k.a. Kentucky Fried Airplane)
I’m a big fan of Airplane! There are so many levels of jokes in this movie that it’s always a great pleasure to see it again and again. I was never lucky enough to look at it on board though. May be I should do that on my next flight… Hummm.

Countdown loudly
This could really scare your fellow passengers, which would in turn not be good for you. Since a couple of years, passengers no longer hesitate to “neutralize” one of them. Sometimes in quite violent ways. Putting your heads on your ears when you reach “zero” would certainly make things worse.

Two days ago, in Austin, a pilot committed suicide by crashing his aircraft into a building. This is before all a tragedy and my thoughts go to the victims and their relatives. But this is also an isolated act from a desperate individual, who left a suicide manifesto behind him, so that there are no doubts this was not an accident. Each time an aircraft hits a building, ugly memories come back to the surface, and some of the this-should-never-again-let’s-regulate activists are on steroids for weeks.

Naturally, as a pilot, I’m against new, more constraining regulations. I had to live my passion for flying in a much harder environment after the 9/11 events, and I understand the role and reasons behind some of the new rules. However, in this case, we should really consider what could be changed to prevent such dramatic events. Sometimes, the forces driving someone to suicide act suddenly, and sometimes they are at work for long times. In this case, the pilot went through a careful preparation phase. The building he hit was not selected randomly. This was the well prepared action of the final act of a pilot.

If he had not be a pilot, the things would probably have been similar. He could have hit the building with a van, a truck, or try to put himself on fire at the reception desk, who knows ? It is not because a light aircraft was used by someone in despair to commit suicide that new restrictions should be put in place. There is simply no way to read the mind of someone, and until we can get suicidal people detectors, there will be no way to do anything sensible. Pilots undergo periodical medical examination but suicidal trends can develop very quickly, sometimes within hours if not minutes.

AOPA’s CEO Craig Fuller posted this note on his blog with some facts and perspective regarding the number of suicides per year in the USA. It makes very clear that the aviation community contributes very little to these numbers. So please, dear rule makers, try not to over-react this time, and take the time to understand what did go on. It is not always possible to identify what went wrong and make a rule against that. Suicidal people which run along such a plan are very determined and when you decided to bring your life to an end, there’s not a lot of things that can stop you…

This is a very sad story, and the whole aviation community will have to fight again to make sure our freedom to fly does not get even more restricted because of the acts of an isolated people…

To get an IFR rating in the JAA world (read most of Europe), a pilot must know:

• How many atomic clock are on board a GPS sattelite
• The topic of each of the 18 annexes of the ICAO convention, per number
• How many lines are painted on the runway to materialize the threshold, as a function of the runway’s width
• The frequency range of each possible navaid, even things like glide-slope that are not visible in the cockpit
• Which ICAO document is known as “Procedures for Air Navigation Services – Air Traffic Management”: Doc 8168, Doc 1234, Doc 4444 or Doc 7333
• Which section of the AIP contains the the detailed characteristics of an airport’s runway
• What does a 9 mean in the field H of a SNOWTAM

I could continue this list almost endlessly, the one meter long bookshelf holding my IFR theory books is kind of a treasure chest for such useless information. The funny thing is that the theory syllabus is extremely vast, but the examination is always based on a relatively limited set of multiple choice questions. These questions are naturally kept “secret” by the examination authorities, but strangely many flight schools seem to know them. Passing the written test is the biggest hurdle in getting an Instrument Rating in Europe, it lasts much longer than the practical training.

Before taking the practical, in flight examination, the Instrument Rating Examiner can ask the candidate pilot a couple of theory questions, but this is usually much more oriented towards “real life” flying, and does not last for long. Nothing compared to the oral exam that US pilots have to go through, which typically lasts for two hours, in front of a real person, not a computer or a form with check-boxes… Any guess which version I do prefer ? And what about you ?

I feel just like a yogurt with a passed expiry date. Earlier this week, my medical certificate expired. As I don’t have flying plans in Europe this year – mostly because of the Flying Across America project – and because my medical examiner is still in Geneva, I decided to let it expire. According to the Swiss interpretation of the JARs, changing medical examiner requires a transfer of the file, and a serious argumentation. Living in Germany is certainly one. When I discussed with fellow pilots here about that, I learned that the German interpretation is a bit different, pilots can go to any examiner they want for renewing their medical certificate.

Even if Switzerland and Germany both apply the JARs, they do it in slightly different ways, and this is also true regarding the medical certification. The German interpretation is very strict, for example every loss of blood must be reported to the medical examiner. Cut your finger with a knife while cooking, and you can’t fly until your examiner re-declares you as fit. The same thing applies to any stay in a hospital lasting for more than 6 hours (not clear if waiting times are included). In this context, I was not sure I wanted to transfer my medical certificate and my license to Germany. Each JAR country has its own license register, and it is theoretically possible to have a medical certificate and a license issued by different countries. Typically, my MEP / IR rating was passed with a German examiner, but was issued by Switzerland.

So even if nothing changed since last Tuesday for me, physically speaking, I can’t legally exercise my flying privileges anymore. As long as I had a valid medical certificate, it was my duty as pilot to decide if I was fit for flying or not. Having a medical certificate does not mean I was always fit, but that I could make this call. Now, even if I feel fit, I’m simply not allowed to fly as pilot in command anymore. Just like yogurts turn from healthy to toxic at midnight (local time) on their expiry date, all my flying privileges vanished this week. So are the rules, and I respect them. I really hope to resume my flying in JAR-land in 2011, and this will start with a new medical examination.

There are many ways to classify airports: controlled or uncontrolled (for US readers, towered or non-towered ), with grass or concrete runway, with or without commercial or airline traffic. I learned to fly on the grass runway of a controlled airport with international traffic (read Geneva, Switzerland, LSGG) and I sometimes feel a bit uncomfortable when I fly to an airport without ATC. This runway is rather short, but well maintained, so soft and short field operations are no issues to me.

As always, my questions for this month are simple: how do you like your airports ? Small, remote grass strips or large concrete runway with lot of jet traffic ? With or without air traffic control ? Or something in between ?