mtrescott

Glassy Water Landing in a Lake Amphibian LA-4-200 Seaplane

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Glassy water landings are among the most difficult water landings to make, since it’s often impossible for a pilot to judge his or her height above the water. Seaplanes pilots use a glass water landing technique where they descend at 100 to 150 feet per minute until they contact the water. In this case, with a narrow canal, there were many visual references around me, making my glassy water landing much easier than if it were performed on a larger body of water, far from shore.

Night Flying Safety—What Your CFI Didn’t Teach You!

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There’s a common myth that flying at night is no different than flying in the daytime because the airplane doesn’t know it’s dark. While perhaps clever, that’s irrelevant. What does matter is that night accentuates the shortcoming of pilots’ senses and perceptions, which makes it harder to fly safely at night. Not surprisingly, the night accident rate is abysmal. Based on surveying hundreds of people who’ve attending my seminars, I’m confident that most GA pilots log less than 5% of their flight hours at night. Yet fully 21% of all fatal accidents in the U.S. occur at night. In the San Francisco Bay area, nearly 50% of all fatal accidents occur at night, probably because of the unique combination of fog and mountains.

Flying the Lake Amphibian LA-4-200 Seaplane

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This video shows a series of water landings on canals in the Delta region of northern California. The canals in this video are a few miles northeast of Byron Airport. The pilot, Max Trescott, is the 2008 National Flight Instructor of the Year and teaches flying out of the Palo Alto Airport in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Lake LA-4-200, also known as the Buccaneer, is an American four-seat light amphibious aircraft. Lake Amphibians have their roots in the grand tradition of flying boats maintained by the Grumman Corporation through the first half of the 20th century. The Lake’s basic design was created by former Grumman designers shortly after the end of World War II, and refined through the years. You can learn more about Lakes at www.lakeflyers.com.

Female Student Pilots – Barriers to Completing Flight Training

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Men and women are different. But knowing how they are different when it comes to flight training is not well known. A review of FAA Airman statistics showed that over the prior ten years, women consistently comprised 6% of total pilots and 6% of CFIs, yet were 11% of student pilots. That suggested to me that women may drop out of flight training at a higher rate than men. Also, as an active flight instructor, I realized that I have had relatively few women clients, but that female CFIs seem to have a relatively large number of female clients. Thus I wondered, are women student pilots more likely to complete flight training and earn a certificate if they have a female CFI versus a male CFI? My mail survey was design to test that hypothesis and identify barriers to completing flight training.

BrightLine – Flight Bags for Pilots

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The BrightLine flight bag for pilots is clearly the most well thought out design for a flight bag. It absolutely reeks with creativity and innovation. The bag has seemingly dozens of zipper pockets, all of them with color-coded zipper pulls so you can instantly open the right pocket, assuming of course that you remember the colors. It has room for two headsets, but if you only want to carry one, half of the bag can be unzipped and left at home. So you could conceivable divide up the two half bags into one for IFR and one for VFR, or one for the stuff you need when flying at night versus in the day.

There are separate pockets for your sunglasses, a cell phone, a VFR radio, flashlights, a Leatherman tool, charts and more. Coincidentally, the charts pocket is the perfect size for my Apple iPad, which I generally carry instead of paper charts.

Rod Machado Video – New Books, eBooks and Audio CDs

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Rod Machado is well known to most pilots as an entertaining speaker and a prolific producer of aviation training books, ebooks and audio CDs. In this video interview, I asked Rod about what new products he was working on and he went into great detail on his future books and projects. Of course he couldn’t talk without injecting plenty of his trademark which made our time together even more enjoyable. I hope you enjoy my interview with author and National Aviation Safety Counselor Rod Machado.

Enflight Flight Planning Software Customizes Weather Briefing with Your Personal Minimums

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Enflight is a weather briefing product that provides a front end user interface to DUATs so that you get a legal FAA briefing. It’s unique in that it lets you enter your personal minimums and then analyzes your briefing according to those minimums. Color codes are used that let you quickly spot conditions that approach or exceed your minimums.

Facebook Places Adds Geo-location Service

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Facebook Places is a major new geo-location product from Facebook that, starting tomorrow, lets U.S. iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users “check in” to a business location so that friends can see where they are. Further, users can tag friends with them when they check in, which cross posts the location to the friend’s Facebook account. Users can also see a list of people who’ve checked into the same location, even if they’re not a friend.