Aviation Speak

You'll often hear the term airmet during weather briefings. An airmet is a weather advisory issued only to amend the area forecast. It includes information about weather that is of interest to all aircraft and potentially hazardous to aircraft having limited capability.

It's worth noting that the FAA includes lack of pilot qualifications along with lack of instrumentation and other equipment in its definition of limited aircraft capability. If you think about it, that makes sense because the most sophisticated aircraft in the world can only be flown within the pilot's capabilities. If your aircraft is instrument equipped but you aren't instrument rated, all that gear doesn't do you much good.

Airmet is a shortened form of airmen's meteorological information, but you will almost never hear the longer name. Airmets deal with less severe weather than their counterparts - sigmets and convective sigmets. But that doesn't mean you should take them lightly. Conditions identified in an airmet can be very serious to pilots of light aircraft. Airmets may deal with moderate icing, moderate turbulence, sustained surface winds of 30 kt or more, widespread areas of ceilings below 1,000 feet or visibility of less than three miles, and extensive mountain obscuration.

Dead Reckoning

In flying, dead reckoning is a type of navigation that relies on timing and calculations. If you haven't yet tried dead reckoning, you will. It's a requirement for the private pilot certificate, and you're sure to get plenty of practice during your cross-country training.

When you navigate by dead reckoning, you use information about your airspeed, course, heading, and ground speed along with information about elapsed time and wind direction to determine your location, arrival time, and so on. You can expect to combine pilotage - the use of landmarks and other terrain features for navigation - with dead reckoning during your training.

Incidentally, you shouldn't let the name dead reckoning scare you. It's widely believed to be a corruption of the abbreviation de'd reckoning, which in turn comes from deduced reckoning.

Another theory suggests that the term began with maritime navigation and refers to a method for determining your position relative to something stationary or "dead in the water." Either way, being proficient at dead reckoning is good way for pilots to keep themselves alive.

Go Around

If you fly at a nontowered field, you are probably used to making your own decisions about when to abandon a landing approach and go around for another try. In fact, that's an option you have at any airport if you determine that you cannot safely complete the approach and landing.

But at towered airports, you're not the only one with the discretion to determine whether or not to go around. The tower may issue a go-around instruction for any number of reasons, ranging from conflicting traffic to debris on the runway. The instruction will come in the form of your aircraft identification number followed by the words go around. That phrase is sometimes followed by specific instructions, such as a heading to fly or an altitude to climb to, especially if the controller wants you to do something outside of standard procedure. The controller is not required to tell you why you are being sent around, but often he or she will do so.

If you are told to go around but given no further instructions, you should overfly the runway, climb to traffic pattern altitude, and turn crosswind to re-enter the pattern just as you would if you were practicing go-arounds or doing pattern work.

If you are on an instrument flight plan and you get no further instructions beyond being told to go around, you should execute the published missed approach procedure.