PHILIP GREENSPUN: So
remember, as VFR pilots, you're actually going
to be doing stuff that is in some ways more challenging
than what airline pilots do, because you're always
trying to keep clearances from clouds that the IFR
pilots don't care about. And if you're flying a
low performance airplane, you're also dealing with
flying through the weather instead of just
going on top of it. So while you're
the VFR only pilot, these non-local flights, really
pay attention to weather. Airspace, go and study this
a little bit before the exam. Here are the different kinds. Remember Class A is up high. You need an
instrument clearance. Class B is around
the biggest airports. Class Charlie's around
Manchester, New Hampshire. And D is for Hanscom. And E is everywhere else. OK. The goal for the basic
VFR weather minimums is to make sure that an IFR
plane coming out of the cloud has time to see and avoid
you, because the air traffic controller's job is to separate
IFR airplanes from each other. It's not to separate
IFR and VFR traffic. They will tell you about them. But you're responsible
as a VFR pilot for staying reasonably
clear of clouds. So just review these
cloud clearances. Class E, you can see that
this is a pretty good one to remember for the test-- 500 below, 1,000 above,
2,000 horizontally. If you're really low
in Class G airspace, you can do some crazy stuff. Again, I don't think
that this is really there to let you go from
Boston to Chicago scud running with one
mile of visibility and just clear of the clouds. I think it's more to enable
people to say, take off and do pattern work at
their home airport in some kind of little
tiny, very slow airplane. TINA SRIVASTAVA: Pattern
work is just what we were drawing
on the chalkboard, flying the traffic
pattern at an airport. PHILIP GREENSPUN: OK. So again, yeah, just review the
presentation or the FAA book so you know your
weather minimums. Yeah, incredibly at
night for Class G, getting back to that
pattern work thing, if you want to go out and
practice takeoffs and landings at night, if you stay within
half a mile of the runway, you can go right down to one
mile of visibility and right up to the clouds. OK. Here's that chart again. Learn it. Know it. A special VFR-- actually
if you're at Hanscom and the weather is below the
basic minimums and you say you want to do some pattern work
anyway either in a helicopter or in an airplane,
you can request-- they can't offer it,
but you can request-- a special VFR clearance. And they'll say, OK, there's not
too much IFR traffic right now. So you take off and
land and do your stuff. If it's at night, you'll have
to be an IFR pilot basically. Cirrus publishes this good
Personal Minimum Matrix. I wouldn't say that you have to
adopt their specific numbers. But I think their way
of thinking isn't bad. So notice they're
saying if you are, let's see, an average
pilot, so you've got 10 IFR hours within
the last 90 days, you've done one not on
autopilot with approach within the last 90
days, well, go over here and go down to a
500-foot ceiling and two miles of visibility. Don't go down to the published
approach minimums, which are designed for a two
pilot professional crew unless you know
you're very current, you've done a whole bunch of
flying in the last 90 days. Anyway, so they
just try to fit-- they try to say, how challenging
is this flight, how experienced are you in general, how
experienced are you recently, and come up with some numbers. So again, you can pull
this out of the slide. TINA SRIVASTAVA:
And just to clarify what we're talking about when
we're talking about personal minimums, so there
are minimums that you have to know for the FAA exam
like we were just talking about in terms of the minimum
visibility that must be there in order for you to fly in
certain classes of airspace. But then there are also minimums
that you set on yourself to be a safe pilot and to
be knowledgeable about what your restrictions and
what your experience and what your currency is. So for example, we
talked about crosswind. So there isn't an
FAA reg necessarily. As long as it's within
your aircraft's operating conditions, there's no specific
reason why a 15 or 20 knot crosswind is a problem. But maybe you're not
very comfortable with it. You haven't done a
lot of slips recently. You're still getting
used to your aircraft. So you might say a smaller
crosswind or gusting winds would be appropriate
for you to land it. So that's setting a personal
minimum on yourself. And this is an example
of personal minimums based on your experience
and your currency. PHILIP GREENSPUN: Yeah, and the
FAA will never suggest this. But the appropriate escape
from a challenging situation that you think might be
on the edge of safety is to rent the five seat SR22
instead of the four seat SR20 and go with an instructor. So it's as easy as that. OK, remember, this
was confusing. They used category in
class to mean two totally different things-- forgetting your
pilot's certificate. The category is
there on the left, something like an airplane
versus a rotorcraft. And the class would
be multi-engine land versus a helicopter
category class. But then for aircraft, they do
something totally different. And they say category would be
normal category or acrobatic. And class would be airplane. So they may ask you about
this just because they like to torture you. The four forces of
flight, remember these. Tina talked about them. If you're just bombing
along, straight and level, not accelerating,
then they're going to all be in balance,
because F equals ma. a equals whatever--
can't remember the math. Anyway, F equals ma. I know that much. Remember these three axes. They'll ask you about
this on the test usually in combination
with some other stuff. So rotation about the vertical
axis is going to be yaw. Rotation about the--
this is complicated. Let's see. Rotation about the lateral
axis is going to be pitch. Rotation around the longitudinal
axis I believe will be roll. So that's a little
bit confusing since-- yeah, here we have
it-- pitch, roll, yaw. So think about it. Roll is really the
lateral motion. But it's around the
longitudinal axis. So don't get confused there. Remember why Johnny Cessna can't
hover is also a limit for-- this limits
everything basically. The stalling angle of attack
is why you need a helicopter if you want to hover. And it is why you need to
maintain a reasonable airspeed when you're landing. And it's also-- it
limits your runway. If you had an airplane that
didn't stall till it reached some crazy angle of
attack, you could probably take off and land in 50 feet. TINA SRIVASTAVA: Right. And remember that we talked
about even a paper airplane can generate lift. So it's not about the
shape of the cross section of the wing that is making
you be able to generate lift. It's the angle of
attack and your ability to deflect air molecules down. That's what generates lift. That shape of the airfoil is
just what Philip was saying. That allows you to have
the stall speed be lower. PHILIP GREENSPUN: All right,
so remember your left turning tendencies. Mostly you just remember
that you need right rudder. TINA SRIVASTAVA: And
a couple questions had come up on
gyroscopic procession. So I added two videos
about gyroscopes to help you understand
gyroscopic procession and why that force is
applied 90 degrees later. And so those are really
fun videos you can look at. There's in this slide deck
called Q&A and Review. PHILIP GREENSPUN: OK, so let's
go back to the altitudes. So true altitude is your
actual height above sea level. This is what's important if you
want to get over a mountain, because the altitude on
the chart for the mountain is also the actual
height above sea level. Indicated is what
your altimeter shows. If you're below 18,000 feet
and it's not some insane temperature and you've got
a current altimeter setting from air traffic control as you
fly along with VFR advisories, they'll keep updating
you with altitudes. If you're not talking to ATC,
you may tune in to the airports that you're flying over to
get the altimeter there. If you have your
correctly set altimeter, it should be pretty close
to your true altitude. But and the GPS will
give it to you as well. All right, absolute
height above the ground, I don't think that's
ever really relevant. Pressure altitude is
what you see if you tune your altimeter to 29.92. Density is critical for
determining performance of both the aircraft and the engine. So that's a measure of how
many actual molecules of air are there going to be in a
1-liter cylinder, for example. Know your taxiway
and runway markings. This has practical value
and also test value. One easy thing to
remember is, if you're driving along a taxiway
in your aircraft, you will see yellow paint
on a black paved surface. So that sign tells you what
taxiway that you're actually on, just like the
real world experience of yellow paint on black. Everything else is
reasonably self-explanatory. They probably-- even though if
you're not an instrument pilot, they want you to know about
this ILS hold short line. So if it's bad
weather conditions and they're using
the ILS, they don't want you going beyond there,
because your metal airplane might interfere with the radio
beams that are being sent up to landing IFR airplanes. Remember L/D MAX for
best glide speed. So all these climb speeds,
glide speeds, et cetera, are driven off of the points at
which the various drags reach a minimum, or a minimum
per mile traveled. Thunderstorms, the
one thing you-- I hope you do remember
is that everything's bad about convective clouds. Unstable air leads
to cumulus clouds. They can become
cumulonimbus clouds. And now you have a
really bad hazard to aviation with terrible icing,
terrible turbulence, maybe hail. So the squall line, I
think they sometimes ask about this on the test. The frontal band
of thunderstorms are just-- it's hard
to get around them. And you may have to go
500 miles out of your way to get around a cold front. Or hang out on the
ground for a few hours and wait for it to pass. TINA SRIVASTAVA: Also,
just big changes in weather usually are not a good thing. So whether it's a big change
in the barometric pressure, or as we saw from
yesterday to today, a 40, 50 degree increase
in the temperature is going to be accompanied
by massive gusting winds. Today is not a good
day to go flying. PHILIP GREENSPUN: Yeah, although
actually it might not just be the day. It might be how are we ferrying
a helicopter from Los Angeles back to Boston. And there was a
thunderstorm coming in. So we just landed in an airport. It was probably
gusting about 30 knots at the time, which isn't that
bad for a Robinson, a four seat Robinson. Put the helicopter in a hangar. There's a huge storm. And two hours later, we took
off in beautiful weather and continued our flight. There is an airport usually
every 10 or 15 minutes of flight time. So take advantage of that. If things are getting
beyond your comfort zone, don't just blindly continue
to your destination. So remember, the alee
side of mountains is where you can get a lot
of turbulence and downdrafts. A little airplane doesn't have
a whole lot of climb performance usually, especially up
at higher altitudes. So be cautious about
crossing big mountain ranges unless the winds aloft forecast
is for very light winds indeed. Icing, also super bad-- again, as VFR
pilots, you shouldn't have to worry about this once
you get into instrument flying, as I hope a lot of you will. This is really what
limits your ability to travel around in a
Piper Cessna or Cirrus during the winter
and shoulder seasons. Remember how to read the METAR. So this is back to Peachtree
Dekalb Airport in Atlanta. So there sits the 16th at
1653, so about almost 5:00 PM in London Zulu Time. Winds are variable at 4, 10
statute miles of visibility, overcast 6,000 feet. That's 6,000 feet above the
airport, not above sea level. Temp's 14. Dew point's minus 7. Altimeter's 3015. Oh and in the remarks, it
says the rain ended 46 minutes after the hour. There you have it. All right, human
factors summary-- so you are the weakest link. And if you develop
some personal minimums, you'll be way ahead of the game. They should also factor in your
recent experience, not just your overall level of flying. And always remember that it's
a big aviation community. There's a lot of people that
are happy to go flying-- can send mail to the members
of the MIT Flying Club and just take a copilot. That's how the airlines have
cut risk almost to zero. Magnetic variation,
this is a topic that tends to snag people
on the knowledge test. So just remember, you can
re-derive it from the VOR if you ever get stuck. And east is least, west is best. Deviation-- then don't get
deviation and variation confused. So deviation, remember, is
that tiny little correction that's printed right
underneath the compass. Flight planning tip, you
saw this slide earlier. Even if FAR 61 and FAR 91 allow
it, it doesn't mean it's wise. So if you look at
FAR 121 and FAR 135 for charger and scheduled
airline service, they show you that there
are some extra safety margins that can be built in. Night flying advice
you just heard. Remember, as the
owner/operator, you're responsible for keeping
the airplane airworthy if you do choose to go
out and buy an aircraft. So these responsibilities
are for most of you going to be on the flight school. However, you're still the
final authority as the pilot. And you can deviate from
the rules in an emergency. And you only have to report
the deviation if requested. I think the feds like to
ask this on the knowledge test, because the natural
answer is, of course, you have to report
the deviation. And I declared it an emergency,
and I broke the rules. But you don't actually
have to report that unless they ask you to. TINA SRIVASTAVA: But even
aside from an emergency, you're the pilot in command. Even if someone very assertively
tells you to land and hold short or to fly straight to the
numbers, which means don't fly the proper traffic pattern
but land very quickly, or tells you no delay
on the go because they want you to get out quickly,
they have other jets, you can just say, unable. And they have to
deal with it and make sure you're flying safely. And if you, especially
as a student pilot, need extra time or
extra consideration, just add student pilot to the
end of all your radio calls. And they'll give you plenty
of room to make mistakes. But they might also make you sit
there and fly a bunch of 360s while they land everybody else
and then give you time to land. PHILIP GREENSPUN: Yeah, so
safety is not high tech. It should be probably. We should actually--
all the stuff that Michael showed you that's
embedded in that DJI drone should probably be in these
multimillion dollar aircraft. But it's not. So in the meantime,
since an airliner isn't actually that much
smarter than a little Cessna, why is it safer? And if you take that
perspective and just adapt all the things the
airlines have done, you can make flying that little
Cessna dramatically safer. So that means
recurrent training. Maybe go up with an instructor
every three months instead of the every two years
that the FAA requires. The instrument flying
skills are really important for VFR safety. They make you a much
better pilot at night, as we've just
discussed, and even bombing around during the day. You'll be able to
fly with about 5% of your mental
energy instead of 50% if you are an instrument-rated
pilot on a nice VFR day. The two pilot crew and checklist
is really the cornerstone of the airline safety system. So and you can take advantage
of that as a GA pilot even though the FAA really-- about 5% of the FAA,
which is the one you've seen and interacted with, is
all about encouraging people to be single pilots. And 95% of the FAA is
about forbidding people to operate single pilot. Every part of the
FAA that regulates the airlines and charters of
sizable airplanes, they say no. Of course, you can't
operate single pilot. That would be
incredibly dangerous. All right, so just
remember, study a little bit about the Part 61
and Part 91 for learning to-- now, what does it take to be and
maintain your status as a pilot or be able to exercise
your privilege as a pilot. That certificate never expires. Part 91 is about what you can
do with an airplane operated privately. And then there's
this little corner over there under
Title 49, Part 830, having to do with accident
reporting and investigation. If you want to get 100 on
the FAA knowledge test, a lot of East Coast Aero Club
customers seem to over-study. I see a lot of 95s, 97s,
98s, and 100s, actual 100s. Just reread the FAA textbooks. I mean, they can't ask
you anything that's not in one of their own PDFs. That includes the FAR/AIM,
though, the regulations and the Aeronautical
Information Manual. There are test prep books
and online equivalents that are worth it. To finish this course,
actually, you can get this-- you'll be able to get-- actually, we don't
even need to email you, because if you have the course
homepage, you can see it here. You go to this
King Schools thing. And you say you want
to do 60 questions. TINA SRIVASTAVA: 60 is
the number of questions on the actual exams. We're making our final
exam be the same. PHILIP GREENSPUN: And
then you Start Test. You need to send us the results. And we'll be happy. All right, next steps-- if you
want to continue your journey beyond this class, maybe that's
for the one or two people-- TINA SRIVASTAVA: And
can I borrow that the-- PHILIP GREENSPUN: --for whom
that applies that actually want to continue their journey. TINA SRIVASTAVA: Can I borrow
the pointer for just a second? Just for the guys that were
getting tripped up thinking it was a river, this is exactly
what we were talking about. This is Boston Logan. These blue lines, circles that
are around it, are not rivers. It's indicating that
Class Bravo airspace. And I have it open over here
if you want to take a look. PHILIP GREENSPUN: OK, so
yeah, join the flying club. Go visit a flight school. Most of the busier US airports
have some kind of flight school that you can do. And yeah, in the two
hours that are remaining to me for this
presentation, I would just like to say thank you. TINA SRIVASTAVA: Now,
we're saying thank you. But just to clarify, there's
a really cool guest speaker coming next. But for the purposes of our
teaching, thank you very much. And we'll take any questions.
