Ask a pilot

[ace_of_something]

How easy is it to pass your destination by about 150 miles?

edit: Curses Ninja'd!

 

[x434343]

What types of aircraft have you flown?

 

[Aur0ra145]

Have you ever been in serious danger?

If not, do you know a fellow pilot who has?

Yes and yes. I've lost an engine at 8k in a Cessna 172, got it restarted and landed; but wasn't fun. I've also had a windshield crack and blow in on me (C-172 again), thankfully it was just about 1/4 of the windshield, otherwise I'd of been dead; but I had to make an emergency landing at an airfield that wasn't very far away.

I've had two friends so far die in airplanes and atleast two put them down in fields, plus other engine problems and stuff. Though our training pretty much is just a really long reinforcement of proceedures to go through when the crap hits the fan. So, thankfully most of the horrible stuff we live through.

^ What rating do you hold?

Im at Student with 18 hours

Sinlge Engine Commerial, Multi-Engine Commercial and an insturment rating. Though I have been thinking about getting my CFI, CFII and MEI.

My question is does anyone who needs glasses able to fly a planeor helicopter. Because I LOVE flying, real or fake (yes ive flown a plane). But i dont know if i can for a job. Sad Face...

The way to make a small fortune in aviation is to start out with a large one...

Saying that, I know you can get a class 3 medical even if you need glasses. Which will allow you to obtain a private pilot license for whatever aircraft you prefer. Though I don't know about 2nd and 1st class medicals. I have perfect vision so those questions have never come up at the flight surgeon.

Do you put on a fake voice to do the announcements or do you use your real one?

Depends on the flight, if I'm hauling friends then I'll mess around a bit. But if we have business clients then it's all serious.

Howdy,

Well I searched as saw we didn't have any threads about pilots. I'm a pilot, so here I am to answer your questions about pilots, airplanes and flying in general.

Ask away

Could you please take a look at this thread and comment.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.151305?page=1

Also, jets easier to fly than turboprop aeroplanes?

Stupid pilots are stupid. I have no idea how you could miss your airport by that much AND not do something about it. They should loose their tickets and have to take their exams again, including their type ratings. That's just not acceptable of a professional pilot.

Well, turboprops and jets are about the same. Now days you don't need to worry about critical engines on prop-twins b/c of counter rotating engines but there is still piloting envolved. All in all it really depends on the plane, some just fly better than others. I prefer turbo-props but I'm old school.

Whats with the weird english at the airport and on the plane?

Eh, abbreviations make the world go round.

 

[fenderstrat]

have you seen any UFO's?

being serious, not ufo's, but have you ever seen something weird or out of the ordinary up there?

 

[Smagmuck_]

Howdy,

Well I searched as saw we didn't have any threads about pilots. I'm a pilot, so here I am to answer your questions about pilots, airplanes and flying in general.

Ask away

Uh, I'm not an actual pilot but I've flown from my home town of Yuma to San Diego in FSX. Me being the idiot I am, I set up impossible sinerios of failures. I just want to know, what do you do when you have an egine falure, altimeter failure and a rear left gear failure on let's say a Beechcraft Baron 58? Could you also put in easy to understand terms, those failures stated above seem to be the most common in my multible crashes.


EDIT: I meen Becraft Baron 58.

 

[Aur0ra145]

Congrats you passed my miniquiz

No I havnt soloed yet I have to do spins and stalls first, and I fly from Centennial KAPA in Colorado 2nd busiest GA airport in the US

They make you do spins before you solo? Wow. I didn't have to, but then again my flight instructors didn't want me out doing spins everynight for fun and breaking gyros.

KAPA, I've heard of it haven't been there. I'm out of 52F in Roanoke, Texas. It's supposedly the largest privately owned GA airport in the US. We're right next to Alliance KAFW and the Blue Angles were there last weekend.

Well good luck, and you'll be amazed at how much faster the plane goes without your fatass instructor in it with you.

I'm also a student pilot right now. Just started this September. Just wondering, where did you start learning?
Because I am learning at a college, and I wanted to know if you learned through a college or an independent flight school.

I was a lucky one. After my freshman year of college I was driving home from Texas Tech and decided I wanted to work at a flight school over the summer. So I got a job as a lineboy fueling airplanes and washing windshields. This however gave me super discounted flight time ($40/hr w/ fuel) and free instruction. That's how I got through my insturment, then I just bumed around the airport until I had enough total time to take my commercial. I borrowed an Arrow and passed it, then took a multi-course at another airport and knocked out my commercial in it.

What college are you at? I've had several friends graduate from OSU's flight school as well as South Eastern Oklahoma State. For the most part, I think you get a better education about flying the plane from small flight schools, but a better understanding of the FARs from universities.

Like, I've had instructors let me spin aircraft and get all messed up under the hood, etc. even fly 100 off the ground, or get so close to a lake we had water misting on the rear windows from the prop blast.

I really think university flight schools have a tighter hold on their airplanes and wouldn't let you do stuff like that. That, and I think our chief pilot might have been crazy.

What types of aircraft have you flown?

About ever Cessna ever made, 120, 140, 150, 152, 170, 172, 180, 182, 190, 206, 310, 320, 414, 421, 441 and a bit of time in a Citation Mustang.

I've flown a few pipers stuff like the Apache, Senecca, Seminole, Arrow, Warrior and Cub.

Beechcraft, uhh, Bonanza, Baron 58 and 55, Debonair

Champ, Super Decathalon, Christenson Eagle, Pitts S-2B, Star Duster Too SA 300, Commonwealth, RV-6, RV-8, King Air B-90 and C-90, Shrike Commander, Husky, Mooney... and more

Though out of all of them I like the Cessna 414 (airplane we fly for work) and Pitts S-2B.

The Pitts is just amazing, I love aerobatics, and this is in my opinion the best plane to do them in.

 

[Woburn]

I'm also a student pilot right now. Just started this September. Just wondering, where did you start learning?
Because I am learning at a college, and I wanted to know if you learned through a college or an independent flight school.

I was a lucky one. After my freshman year of college I was driving home from Texas Tech and decided I wanted to work at a flight school over the summer. So I got a job as a lineboy fueling airplanes and washing windshields. This however gave me super discounted flight time ($40/hr w/ fuel) and free instruction. That's how I got through my insturment, then I just bumed around the airport until I had enough total time to take my commercial. I borrowed an Arrow and passed it, then took a multi-course at another airport and knocked out my commercial in it.

What college are you at? I've had several friends graduate from OSU's flight school as well as South Eastern Oklahoma State. For the most part, I think you get a better education about flying the plane from small flight schools, but a better understanding of the FARs from universities.

Like, I've had instructors let me spin aircraft and get all messed up under the hood, etc. even fly 100 off the ground, or get so close to a lake we had water misting on the rear windows from the prop blast.

I really think university flight schools have a tighter hold on their airplanes and wouldn't let you do stuff like that. That, and I think our chief pilot might have been crazy.

I am at Daniel Webster College up in Nashua, NH. It is pretty cool because the campus is literally across the street from Nashua Airport (KASH). They are kind of tight on the rules. They tend to put a buffer on rules for extra safety.

 

[A Weary Exile]

Was Andross hard to kill?

 

[Aur0ra145]

have you seen any UFO's?

being serious, not ufo's, but have you ever seen something weird or out of the ordinary up there?

Yes, once I was flying out north of a pretty busy airport (about 7 miles away) and I was listening to ATC. I heard the control turn 'bandit 1' to downwind. So I knew it was a military aircraft. At which point I couldn't pick up the aircraft on my scan, but suddenly I saw what looked like wingtip landing light shinning at me and growing in size and banking towards me. So, I immediately chopped the trottle and went about 60 degrees nose down. At which I heard the control give 'bandit 1' a crosswind call, meaning he'd already landed and had taken off again.

To this day I have no idea what it was, but it scared the hell out of me.

Howdy,

Well I searched as saw we didn't have any threads about pilots. I'm a pilot, so here I am to answer your questions about pilots, airplanes and flying in general.

Ask away

Uh, I'm not an actual pilot but I've flown from my home town of Yuma to San Diego in FSX. Me being the idiot I am, I set up impossible sinerios of failures. I just want to know, what do you do when you have an egine falure, altimeter failure and a rear left gear failure on let's say a Beechcraft Baron 158? Could you also put in easy to understand terms, those failures stated above seem to be the most common in my multible crashes.

Haha, okay.

Engine failure (pray to God it isn't your critical engine), dead foot dead engine, meaning rudder hard into the working engine. to maintain a good path of flight you'll probably have to slip somewhat to keep going straight on a bearing. Try to restart it, if that fails feather the dead engine if you can. Cross feed fuel if you need to. Set up your blue line (best rate of climb on one engine) and look for a place to land. This is a major emergency and you need to get on the ground ASAP

Altimeter failure. First thing to do is activate your pitot heat, then goto your alternate static port (generally it's in the cockpit.) If both those things don't work, you can break the glass of the VSI, it won't be too terribly accurate, but it will give you something to get you in the ballpark. Next is to land quickly, this insturment is important but won't adversly affect your safety. Pretty much if my engine is out, I could care less about my altimiter.

Gear failure. Barons have a crank down feature thing between and behind the pilot and FO seats (speaking from experience, our gear wouldn't come down one time.) I'd crank that ***** down. Fly by the tower, or someone on the ground with a radio and see if the gear is down. If it isn't down, you can do some high G maneuvers to try and get it locked down. If it isn't locking down you can try to take the gear back up and put it down on it's belly.

Way to do that is fly a normal approach, when you have the runway made kill both engines, master switch off, fuel off, crack open the doors and try to touch down tail first to slow down your crash and once on the ground pull all the way back on the yoke to slow down more quickly and keep you from going over the nose, then GTFO when the plane comes to a stop


I was taught the ABCDE's of engine failures. Meaning:

Airspeed: set best glide speed or Vyse for you flap set-up
Best Place to Land: Find a suitable place to land
Checklist: Do your mental checklist first then pull out your hard copy and go over it again to make sure you didn't miss anything.
Declare: 7700 on the transponder and 121.5 on the radio and tell Onguard who you are, where you are and what your problem is.
Execute: Execute your emergency landing.

All of the above things get alot easier with multiple pilots in the cockpit, for instance, while I'm pitching for airpseed, my co-pilot can have the checklist out and spinning the radio knobs. It also is better to have two sets of eyes taking in the information in front of you and making the best and safest decision.

Thats the quick version, I'm sure I left some stuff out but that's what God made checklists for.

 

[Smagmuck_]

have you seen any UFO's?

being serious, not ufo's, but have you ever seen something weird or out of the ordinary up there?

Yes, once I was flying out north of a pretty busy airport (about 7 miles away) and I was listening to ATC. I heard the control turn 'bandit 1' to downwind. So I knew it was a military aircraft. At which point I couldn't pick up the aircraft on my scan, but suddenly I saw what looked like wingtip landing light shinning at me and growing in size and banking towards me. So, I immediately chopped the trottle and went about 60 degrees nose down. At which I heard the control give 'bandit 1' a crosswind call, meaning he'd already landed and had taken off again.

To this day I have no idea what it was, but it scared the hell out of me.

Howdy,

Well I searched as saw we didn't have any threads about pilots. I'm a pilot, so here I am to answer your questions about pilots, airplanes and flying in general.

Ask away

Uh, I'm not an actual pilot but I've flown from my home town of Yuma to San Diego in FSX. Me being the idiot I am, I set up impossible sinerios of failures. I just want to know, what do you do when you have an egine falure, altimeter failure and a rear left gear failure on let's say a Beechcraft Baron 158? Could you also put in easy to understand terms, those failures stated above seem to be the most common in my multible crashes.

Haha, okay.

Engine failure (pray to God it isn't your critical engine), dead foot dead engine, meaning rudder hard into the working engine. to maintain a good path of flight you'll probably have to slip somewhat to keep going straight on a bearing. Try to restart it, if that fails feather the dead engine if you can. Cross feed fuel if you need to. Set up your blue line (best rate of climb on one engine) and look for a place to land. This is a major emergency and you need to get on the ground ASAP

Altimeter failure. First thing to do is activate your pitot heat, then goto your alternate static port (generally it's in the cockpit.) If both those things don't work, you can break the glass of the VSI, it won't be too terribly accurate, but it will give you something to get you in the ballpark. Next is to land quickly, this insturment is important but won't adversly affect your safety. Pretty much if my engine is out, I could care less about my altimiter.

Gear failure. Barons have a crank down feature thing between and behind the pilot and FO seats (speaking from experience, our gear wouldn't come down one time.) I'd crank that ***** down. Fly by the tower, or someone on the ground with a radio and see if the gear is down. If it isn't down, you can do some high G maneuvers to try and get it locked down. If it isn't locking down you can try to take the gear back up and put it down on it's belly.

Way to do that is fly a normal approach, when you have the runway made kill both engines, master switch off, fuel off, crack open the doors and try to touch down tail first to slow down your crash and once on the ground pull all the way back on the yoke to slow down more quickly and keep you from going over the nose, then GTFO when the plane comes to a stop


I was taught the ABCDE's of engine failures. Meaning:

Airspeed: set best glide speed or Vyse for you flap set-up
Best Place to Land: Find a suitable place to land
Checklist: Do your mental checklist first then pull out your hard copy and go over it again to make sure you didn't miss anything.
Declare: 7700 on the transponder and 121.5 on the radio and tell Onguard who you are, where you are and what your problem is.
Execute: Execute your emergency landing.

All of the above things get alot easier with multiple pilots in the cockpit, for instance, while I'm pitching for airpseed, my co-pilot can have the checklist out and spinning the radio knobs. It also is better to have two sets of eyes taking in the information in front of you and making the best and safest decision.

Thats the quick version, I'm sure I left some stuff out but that's what God made checklists for.

Horray! Now I don't have to look like a total and absolute retard on FSX online! Yaaaaaaaaay!

 

[Aur0ra145]

I'm also a student pilot right now. Just started this September. Just wondering, where did you start learning?
Because I am learning at a college, and I wanted to know if you learned through a college or an independent flight school.

I was a lucky one. After my freshman year of college I was driving home from Texas Tech and decided I wanted to work at a flight school over the summer. So I got a job as a lineboy fueling airplanes and washing windshields. This however gave me super discounted flight time ($40/hr w/ fuel) and free instruction. That's how I got through my insturment, then I just bumed around the airport until I had enough total time to take my commercial. I borrowed an Arrow and passed it, then took a multi-course at another airport and knocked out my commercial in it.

What college are you at? I've had several friends graduate from OSU's flight school as well as South Eastern Oklahoma State. For the most part, I think you get a better education about flying the plane from small flight schools, but a better understanding of the FARs from universities.

Like, I've had instructors let me spin aircraft and get all messed up under the hood, etc. even fly 100 off the ground, or get so close to a lake we had water misting on the rear windows from the prop blast.

I really think university flight schools have a tighter hold on their airplanes and wouldn't let you do stuff like that. That, and I think our chief pilot might have been crazy.

I am at Daniel Webster College up in Nashua, NH. It is pretty cool because the campus is literally across the street from Nashua Airport (KASH). They are kind of tight on the rules. They tend to put a buffer on rules for extra safety.

Don't get me wrong, I believe in good hard rules for pilots learning to fly and students shouldn't be doing stupid stuff by themselves. But with very experienced instructors it is appropriate to put the student if very tasking situations so they'll know what it's like and how to cope with the situation.

At my flight school we had one student go through a fence on the end of the runway, another run out of fuel in flight and another one crash a plane on take-off (stalled the sucker.) Plus people would knock the wheel pants off of planes all the time.

Another thing to consider is flight school insurance is very expensive and having any claims on it could very well possibly make the company end coverage and thus the school. So the rules are there to keep you flying.

But then again, I was the beloved lineboy and the instructors really wanted me to be an amazing pilot so we'd push the envelope as much as possible. As so long as the pilot and the planes limitations aren't surpassed there isn't really any danger. The only danger is in knowing where each limits lay.

Anywho, how many hours do you have and what do you want to do in aviation?

Was Andross hard to kill?

No, but that was because I had on my flight jacket, Ray Bans and wearing an enormous watch.

 

[Slayer_2]

Ever flown in a military craft? I think that'd be pretty sweet as I love flying and the military always has the best of everything.

 

[Aur0ra145]

Hello. What's an airplane?

On topic: I'm not a pilot, but I can fly a plane, thanks to my father for teaching me that. It's a useless for me, but it's fun to go with him on airplane rides, listening to the radio and flying low over the fields.

OK, serious question: What do you, as a pilot, think of Microsoft Flight Simulator?

FSX is blah. It's okay for messing around with insturment stuff, but the aerodynamics are all wrong (try a proper spin in FSX) and it's alot easier to land IRL than in FSX. ATC is FSX is pretty much completely wrong, you don't have the 'norm' of ATC.

In all reality FSX isn't really a simulator but more of an arcade-like game to us 'real' pilots, though I do enjoy messing around in it with friends and flying formation and doing little mini-aerobatic shows. But there are just some maneuvers the game can't handle, like a saber dance for instance.

Ever flown in a military craft? I think that'd be pretty sweet as I love flying and the military always has the best of everything.

Yes, L-5, BT-15 and a L-4. These were all old WWII planes that saw service somewhere in there. I haven't flown anything like a Mohawk or any modern military aircraft.

Infact, if you want to fly in a military airplane try looking into the Commerative Air Force, they're always looking for volunteers and you could become a plane sponsor and get to go up in the various airplanes with the pilots.

http://www.commemorativeairforce.org/

 

[Kollega]

Can you listen to music in flight? If yes,is "Ride into the danger zone" banned?

 

[tsb247]

Hehe... I could get to like this thread.

Do you have any experience with Diamond Aircraft airplanes? I kinda fell in love with DA42s. They just look like a dream to fly.

EDIT: If you could buy a PBY Catalina and live out of it, would you?

 

[GoldenCondor]

Ever flown above Area 51? If you have tried, did you get any radio signals from them?

 

[Aur0ra145]

Can you listen to music in flight? If yes,is "Ride into the danger zone" banned?

The baron I'll putt around in has an Ipod port thing so we can listen to music over the intercom.

"Ride into the Danger Zone" is a favorite, but I like "Ride of the Valkyries" the most for low level flight. "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf is another good one. "Thunderstruck" is my co-pilots favorite. Vera Lynn is another great singer to listen to on long flights home.

And these song will always make you feel like the most badass person on the earth:

NSFW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBfkbO0JuU8

NSFW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BzU1sYPjzo

On the rare occasions I get to go up and dance with my buddy (dogfight), I'll listen to something like Streetlight Manifesto, The Rotters Club or Thrice.

 

[Aur0ra145]

Hehe... I could get to like this thread.

Do you have any experience with Diamond Aircraft airplanes? I kinda fell in love with DA42s. They just look like a dream to fly.

EDIT: If you could buy a PBY Catalina and live out of it, would you?

Nice avatar.

DA42: Well, they burn next to no fuel as I've been told. They seem to be trying what Wing Derringer did back in the 80's. In all I haven't heard alot of stuff about the DA42. There is a flight school around here that has one. But Diamond isn't really a plane to buy. See, if you're going to be spending that much money you might as well get a Beechcraft. Or even a King Air.

Yes, I would definately live out of a PBY. Though if we're talking sea-planes, a Sea Dart would be totally kickass.

Ever flown above Area 51? If you have tried, did you get any radio signals from them?

No I've never flown over Area 51. Though I do know a guy who was flying in New Mexico and had 4 T-38's come up on his aircraft and do alot of crazy stuff to mess with him. He wasn't intercepted, it was more of a fighter-pilots-at-play sort of thing.

 

[Ocelot GT]

Where do (baby) ultralight aircraft come from? :3

 

[SomethingUnrelated]

Have you ever been really suspicious of one of the passengers (provided you saw them)?

If so, did you do anything about it, and if so again, what was it?