Preflight

The technology is one more thing to learn

Some flight schools, primarily at academies and colleges that focus on training future commercial pilots, have invested in all-glass-cockpit training fleets. Similar glass cockpits have been common in modern airliners and business aircraft for several years now, and many of these aviators will never fly an airplane equipped with analog-dial "steam gauge" technology.

Glass-cockpit aircraft are also making their way into training fleets at general aviation airports across the country. There's a lot of interest in this new technology, and many of us want to try it out. When understood by pilots--and used properly--aspects of this technology should make flying safer and easier. Take datalink, for example, which provides a near-real-time weather radar image, superimposed on a moving-map navigation display in the cockpit. If you're looking out the windshield and see a cloud that appears hostile, a glance at the radar image may motivate you to deviate around that cloud and give it a wide berth. (The weather radar images delivered by datalink are typically one to five minutes old; it's not intended to help you pick your way through a line of storms, but to avoid areas of adverse weather.)

Don't worry about walking into your flight school or fixed-base operator tomorrow to find all the familiar training aircraft gone, with gleaming new glass-cockpit replacements in their tie-down spots. But when you do have an opportunity to learn to fly one of these airplanes, don't expect to take off, conduct slow flight and some stalls, and make a few landings to earn a quick

signoff. No, even if you're familiar with an otherwise identical "conventional" Cessna 172, expect a thorough, comprehensive checkout that could require as much as 10 hours of additional training or even more--even though it takes off at the same indicated airspeed, handles the same way, stalls in the same manner, and lands at the same speed.

What drives the checkout requirements? Part of it's the need to learn the electronics. And in some cases, the flight school's insurance company implements a minimum number of training hours in the new equipment. In any case, expect your first checkout in a technically advanced aircraft--one with an IFR-approved GPS, a moving-map display, and an autopilot (and possibly a whole lot more)--to take longer than other aircraft checkouts that you may have experienced (see Karen Kahn's "New to You," p. 22).

Are thorough checkouts warranted? We think so, even in situations that don't involve a technologically advanced aircraft. Without a proper checkout, even a highly experienced pilot can have difficulties with unfamiliar equipment (see Greg Brown's "Flying Carpet: Aerial House Hunting," p. 58). In some modern GA aircraft, it can take two or three hours of training just to master the use of the autopilot--and you might be surprised to know how many pilots are flying aircraft with sophisticated global positioning system navigators, yet they can't use anything beyond the system's most basic "Direct-To" function. It's enough pilots that the AOPA Air Safety Foundation developed a free online course, "GPS for VFR Operations", to help provide some of these skills.

One subject that often gets only a brief mention, if any, in ground school is the forced landing. Sure, on training flights our instructors often ask us, "Where would you land if the engine quit now?"--sometimes surreptitiously pulling the throttle to idle to emphasize the point. We pick a (hopefully) suitable field, line up for the landing, and then the engine miraculously comes back to life and we climb to altitude. After all, our aircraft and their engines are really pretty reliable, aren't they?

Yes, they are, and as Jeff Pardo notes in "Unexpected Arrival" (p. 36), the chance that you'll ever have to make a forced landing is really pretty low--especially if you heed any early warning signs and opt for a precautionary landing instead.

Unfortunately, forced landings still occur on a too-regular basis. As Pardo observes, many result from fuel exhaustion or fuel mismanagement. Regardless of the cause, however, we want you to have a good understanding of the key points to consider--as well as some basic survival skills (see "After the Landing," p. 42). Chances are that you'll never need this information, but we'd rather you have it and not need it than the other way around.