Problems reported with landing gear, brakes, reversers, and shock absorbers

Not sure what you mean. I wasn't disagreeing about flying, just not interested.

I was talking about navigating a boat, and how useful the nearby scale of latitude is in laying out distances. He went off into map projections and stuff, and now flying. Interesting stuff no doubt, but far from my interest.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

It's mandatory because of fools like this:

Scheduled flights have to fly by instrument (IFR) rules. Mostly the flights are along airways, which are charted with directions and distances for each leg, there is little to navigate by the other maps.

The end points of the cruise legs are at designated waypoints which are defined with radio navigation aids. There are also waypoints defined by GPS coordinates, and it is allowed to use them if there is an approved GPS system on board and with a current navigation databsase.

There are aviation maps for visual flight (VFR). They are in Lambert conformal conic projection, which gives both good directions and distances measurable along the projected route line. The price to pay for that is that the longitude lines are fan-formed and latitude lines are arcs.

The maritime maps are a different story, they use the Mercator cylinder projection. It stretches the areas near the poles, which here (60 degrees North) means that a measured North-South distance seems to be double to the East-West distance.

1. You mentioned nothing about boating.

1. latitude scale is useful only if you are going directly north or south. Any other direction creates error. You do not know how much error.

2. Maps are useless when you are out of sight of land or your goal.

1. Maps require use of magnetic compass when you cannot see your goal. Magnetic compasses have errors which I outlined.

Flying was a direct response to your statement:

Quote: >>> You've obviously never been a navigator.

I believe my flying history qualifies as navigation and was a direct response to your statement.

Now that GPS is available, it is a far better navigation aid than using a magnetic compass. You can use google maps to get latitude and longitude, and GPS to follow a great circle route.

Magnetic compass errors have a direct bearing on your hobby.

How much "navigation" is involved in flying a small plane? I got the impression one used visual landmarks and VOR and listened to people with radar tell you what to do. Not a lot of spherical trigonometry or sextant stuff.

More like highways and road maps.

You better be able to fly by instruments in a small plane. Nothing says you can't go visual during the flight, but you better know instrumented flying when you need it. It's so easy to become disoriented- as in losing sense of up from down, exacerbated by weird accelerations- if something happens that obscures your orientation, like darkness, fog or clouds, less than perfect weather. So many people get killed doing that the FAA really should require all pilots to qualify. You don't want anyone too stupid to learn instruments to fly anyway.

Does that require mathematics?

How much math proficiency has to be demonstrated to get a pilot's license?

Only in so far as reading a display.

Next to none.

The helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant was a pilot disorientation issue. He thought he was pulling up when in fact he was ramming it straight into the ground. It was those thick low cloud banks that move in real fast that did it to him. The pilot had plenty of experience and should have known better. His fault was he exercised bad judgment playing fast and loose with a potentially deadly situation.

Not very much above addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Most of the instrument training goes to make the pilot trust the instruments more than his seat of pants. There are plenty of distracting accelerations in flight and the human balance sense gets mislead without good visual clues. The air tends to be pretty bumpy in clouds.

The instrument training is about as long as the basic flight training, and it can be done after some basic flight experience is there.

Yu definitely gotta know which way is up if you expect to stay airborne:

Radio and traffic control? What's that? I just did whatever I wanted and never entered controlled airspace.

Yup. Except that nowadays it is usual to have a PDA/phone to indicate your position, particularly w.r.t. controlled airspace.

Even so you have to look out; GPS can be and is spoofed. I know someone that said the GPS indicated he was directly over RAF Boscombe Down, when he could see it several miles away over his wing.

I was never taught to fly with instruments. Quite the contrary in fact: we were taught to fly without instruments because they can (and do) all lie to you.

Before going solo we had a complete flight with the instruments covered up.

Just avoid those situations. Take offs are optional; landings aren't.

You don't want anybody too stupid to fly without instruments to fly anyway!

Okay- now you're talking about the majority of commercial pilots from non-American/ European backgrounds who really can't fly without the automatic flight control systems.

No, I'm not. I'm talking about aircraft where there aren't any automated controls whatsoever.

They did a forensics analysis on the weather at the time of the Fossett crash. He was trying to clear a ridge which had a really heay downdraft going against him and forcing his aircraft to lose elevation. His plane was too hopelessly underpowered to overcome and, as is always the case in mountainous terrain, once you get into it, it's too late to escape. You really need to know your terrain and all the hazards from resulting up-/-down/- cross drafts that can occur BEFORE you're hit by them. Lots of people crash in mountainous terrain.

That's strictly clear weather high visibility conditions flying. Anything less and you're lucky to come through unscathed.

Right, but that's mostly qualitative.

Some things don't need real understanding, just learning and following rules. Nothing wrong with that. A carpenter shows up on a site with a foundation and a load of lumber and nails already there, and starts framing. The rules are clear and simple.

I like electricians, but I've never met one who understood electricity or had actually read the electrical code.

Flying a small plane, filing a flight plan and such, consists of gut learning and following simple rules. It has to be that way.

People are tribal, and a tribe needs most people to follow rules. It only needs a few leaders and thinkers and warriors.

Nope. That's what turn and slip instruments or artificial horizons are for.

You do need proper training and certification before flying in clouds, of course.

The traditional technique involves the pupil sitting inside a hood so they don't have any external references.

Stunning visual reconstruction of the Bryant crash shows how insidious the disorientation can be, the pilot had no clue until it was way too late to do anything about it. And this individual was a pro with tons of time in the air, how well would a part time amateur do?

That disorientation inside clouds can be "a problem" is scarcely news.

Some amateurs are highly skilled and have very significant flying skills. And regularly push the envelope to the extent they know what their machine can and cannot do. Hell's teeth, ab initio Bloggs have to demonstrate repeatedly "departing from controlled flight" and recovering

It is said that the most frequent last words on cockpit voice recorders are "Oh Jesus", and "What's it doing /now/?"

Without automated flying systems, the latter is not an issue :)