21–30 of 251 posts
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You must be fantastically unlucky, by my research (I'm afraid I've lost the citation) the number of pilots who die in flying accidents is about 1/50. How many pilots did you know?
A reasonable number, but many of them were stunt pilots -- or thought they were stunt pilots. I didn't mean to create a false impression. Also remember I mentioned that was a 12-year period.
Don't get me wrong but I do not get what's so exciting about flying yourself or owning a plane. Flying is for getting from point A to B. Flying just for fun missing any purpose might be fun the first couple of times but then it's like driving a bus from A to A.
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The answer is yes. Someone actually did this experiment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJT_CACIZqs But it's pretty challenging. Today's simulators are pretty good, but there's something about having your life actually on the line that can't be captured by a sim.
I had a ton of sim experience when I jumped in a trainer for the first time. It helped a ton with the systems and comms but pretty much nothing for my landing and takeoff ability.
Yes, a common experience. Landing and taking off involve some subtle things that most simulators don't capture, like the fact that in a small propeller-drive plane, at slow speed, the propeller torque twists the body of the airplane, so you have to apply some counter-rudder to straighten out the fuselage and maximize climbing efficiency.
And landing has risks that simulators certainly don't capture, like the all-too-common stall-spin on final approach, which turns out to represent a high percentage of all GA accidents. Most simulators won't even imitate this common problem -- in most simulators you can't force the plane into a spin, either at altitude or while landing. That by itself might make a student overconfident about how much he's learned.
In reality, a student or new pilot turns too slow on final, realizes he's not lined up, so he banks too steeply and applies some aggressive rudder, which causes the inboard wing to stall, then unless the pilot knows exactly what to do and does it instantly, the plane will stall-spin, do a 1/4 turn and hit the ground before an inexperienced pilot can react. A very common accident scenario.
13 MPG is surprisingly good, I always thought it was much, much less.
Yeah, its like an SUV but twice as fast.
You forgot the LAQ: "Can someone who only 'trained' on a Flight Simulator be able to take-off and land in a real plane?'
The answer is yes. Someone actually did this experiment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJT_CACIZqs But it's pretty challenging. Today's simulators are pretty good, but there's something about having your life actually on the line that can't be captured by a sim.
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> about half the pilots I knew in 1980 (instructors as well as students) had been killed in flying accidents Wow, that's certainly dissuasive. By the way, are there some kind of autopilots on modern amateur planes? Or is that even possible to integrate any ?
> By the way, are there some kind of autopilots on modern amateur planes? By "amateur planes" do you mean ultralights or experimental homebuilts? The answer depends on which -- an ultralight could hardly tolerate the extra weight that a decent autopilot would require. And most experimental homebuilt owners probably want the pleasure of actually flying their planes. Autopilots are more attractive to people who fly lon…
Where does most of the weight come from in an autopilot?
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Perhaps 3-5x as fast in terms of time because you don't have to stop at red lights and you can take the "as the crow flies" path instead of zig-zagging. Pretty sweet deal for $30k!
avgas is more expensive doe
It's important to say that the general aviation population has gotten much smaller over the last few decades. It was a lot more popular 25 years ago when I flew much more than I do now. A number of aircraft manufacturers have stopped building small general-aviation planes for a number of reasons including liability and a reduction in public interest. I started flying about 1980. By 1992, 12 years later, about half th…
http://www.pbase.com/geary/image/120224799
That's my mom and me when I took her flying on September 3, 1977. I have the logbook right here that I carried on that flight.
Sadly, this plane was involved in a midair in 1982, and the instructor and student pilot died:
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20020917X...
It's weird, if you sell a car and then it gets in a wreck and someone dies, you don't think about it much - or do you?
I guess you're not likely to find out it happened.
But it really shook me up that two people came to a tragic end in the same plane I used to fly.
R.I.P.