Some routes for IFR flight are direct at any altitude you want, and others are down a tunnel ATC assigns without room for compromise. How will you negotiate a route across New York airspace when there’s icing above, airline traffic below, a cold ocean to the left, and heavy snow approaching from the right?
Every pilot has been there: A need to drain a certain personal sump and a choice between holding it or diverting for a pit stop. However, this diversion is in IMC and the best approach includes a requirement you can’t meet, but certainly won’t need. Will you go for it … or just go later?
Your Piper Comanche might be five decades old, but choice modifications let it keep pace with factory-new aircraft costing five times as much. Some of the classic systems, however, have limitations. Now a jammed handle has you choosing between four challenging—but quite different—plans to deal with it.
This flight from the midwest to Texas has been an all-day game of dodge-storm. That was fine until now when the last leg has you caught between the thunderheads on one side and Class Bravo arrival paths on the other. How much will you push back when ATC points you somewhere you’d rather not go?
It seemed like a good idea at the time: Climb into the clear above potential icing and ride fantastic tailwinds all the way home. You’d arrive in time for a VFR descent and dinner. Now you’re on top of a rising undercast with only oxygen-required altitudes above and known icing below. What’s the best move?
It’s not everyday you get to haul half a ton of auto parts in your airplane, but your friend has parts for a Corvette project that needs getting, and you have the plane to get it. It’s a great day until one small snag turns the road trip movie into an exercise in legal interpretations.
Slogging along in wind and rain at the minimum altitude for the airway, you’ve been in and out of communication with ATC for the past hour. A shortcut clearance promised to lessen your misery but now presents you with a situation they never covered with the black-and-white rules from your IFR ground school.
A quick day trip to a national monument throws you a curve when the GPS signal is lost. What will you do when your only navigation source takes the afternoon off?
The country boy made good, you’re coming home for a family reunion. However, the weather may paint you a fool unless you can finesse a sketchy approach.
You can’t ask for a better excuse to use your airplane for pleasure than a weekend trip to the island. Conditions are perfectly flyable IFR, but a potential mechanical issue puts the whole plan in jeopardy—or does it? What’s the right level of response to a problem that’s not an obvious show stopper?
It’s a dark and stormy night as you approach your home airport at the end of a long day. The showers passing through the region mean there is no obvious choice for an approach to end the day. What will you request from ATC that best balances convenience, risk, and payoff?
You’ve added quite a few handy tricks to your IFR bag, including departing VFR to get your clearance in the air. It’s always worked without a hitch—until this time when ATC asks a question you never expected. Now your options are vanishing and you have only seconds to come up with an answer.
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