Worth
your time

Most icing talks stop at "avoid it." This one, from COPA University's icing program, is built around the airplane a lot of us actually fly: where structural ice forms, why rime, clear, mixed, freezing rain and supercooled large drops are several different hazards rather than one, and what each does to lift, drag, stall margin and control.

Worth the watch in particular:

• TKS versus FIKI. Cirrus has fitted TKS in two forms — one meant to get you out of an inadvertent encounter, one approved for flight into known icing. Same fluid on the wing, very different limitations. The POH for your serial number says which one you have, not the panel.
• The way out. Climb, descend, divert or turn around — and the point at which you stop negotiating and declare.
• Arriving with ice on. Approach and landing technique when the wing isn't the shape it was certified in.
• Seeing it coming. Skew-T diagrams, the GFA and AviationWeather.gov, used to find the freezing level and the tops before you launch.

The FAA's reference for all of it is AC 91-74B, Pilot Guide: Flight in Icing Conditions. It defines supercooled large drops as drops larger than 50 micrometres — freezing drizzle and freezing rain — and it is the one to read before the first cold front of the season.

N990PT, a Cirrus SR22, departed Morristown, New Jersey for Bar Harbor, Maine (KBHB) on July 25, 2024, into weather that should have given both pilot and controller pause: 1.5 miles visibility, a 300-foot ceiling, and the approach lighting system out of service on a NOTAM that raised the minimums for the approach in use. A second NOTAM required the autopilot off below 900 feet — no vectors-to-minimums shortcut that day.

The NTSB's account, built from the airplane's own flight data, is precise about what happened next. The autopilot came off 17 seconds before impact, near 200 feet and four-tenths of a mile from the runway. In the seconds after, pitch went to 30° nose-up and the airplane climbed to 450 feet — then reversed to 25° nose-down with a 68° left bank, descending at 4,000 feet per minute into the trees. Probable cause, per the NTSB: "the pilot's aggressive pitch and power control inputs while executing a missed approach, which resulted in his spatial disorientation and a loss of airplane control." No mechanical fault was found; the engine ran normally to impact.

The full NTSB report is public record: ERA24FA323.

Reaching minimums is the part of an approach everybody briefs. Leaving them is the part that gets rushed — usually at the exact moment workload is highest and the runway environment is somewhere ahead in the murk.

The rule is 14 CFR 91.175(c), and it is worth knowing that it sets three conditions, all of which must hold before you go below DA or MDA:

• The aircraft is continuously in a position from which a normal descent to a landing on the intended runway can be made at a normal rate, using normal manoeuvres.
• Flight visibility is at least what the approach prescribes.
• At least one of the listed visual references is distinctly visible and identifiable — the approach light system, threshold, threshold markings or lights, REIL, VASI, touchdown zone, touchdown zone markings or lights, or the runway and its markings or lights.

The one most often forgotten is the qualifier on the approach lights: with the ALS as your only reference, you may not go below 100 feet above touchdown zone elevation unless the red terminating bars or red side row bars are also distinctly visible.

Fifteen minutes, and worth it before your next IPC.

How to set up a G1000, G1000 NXi, G3000, G5000, or Cirrus Perspective and Perspective+. It isn't a features tour — it's one instructor's list of the settings he thinks are wrong the way most airplanes are left, and what each one buys you once you're airborne. Much of it carries over to a GTN 650 or 750.

Skip ahead about 14 minutes. The episode opens with news and listener mail; the settings walkthrough starts around the fourteen-minute mark and runs to the end.

Three that are worth the listen on their own:

• Traffic vectors: Absolute to Relative. Absolute vectors are white and show where the other aircraft is pointed. Relative vectors are green and show where it is going relative to you — so a green line drawn over your own symbol is a collision course, visible six to eight miles out instead of at the traffic call.
• Track Up, not North Up. Flying south in North Up, a target drawn left of your symbol is out the right window. That mental rotation has to be right in the few seconds you have to find the airplane.
• Pilot profiles save themselves, silently. Any change made in flight is written into the active profile — no save key, no prompt. In a shared airplane, whoever borrows your profile can leave your map North Up and you'd never be told.

We turned it into a checklist. Listening to it is one thing; sitting in the airplane with the master on and working down the menus is another. So the episode's recommendations are now a free, printable sheet — Perspective+ Avionics Setup — every setting worth changing, where to find it, and why it matters, plus the in-flight techniques the settings exist to support. Tick it off in your browser or print it for the kneeboard. It sits with the rest of the pilot resources.

The wording on the sheet is ours; the judgement about what to set and why is his. Listen to the episode too.

A real trip, planned the way we teach it: Norwood (KOWD) to Cleveland and back, worked through the Kneeboard Pro 7-Day Weather Strategy. PlaneWX's trip monitoring and WX Score, the prog charts on aviationweather.gov, and your EFB each come in when their forecasts become worth reading.

• 7 days out. Build the trip in PlaneWX with your personal minimums. They're what drive the WX Score.
• 5 days out. Check the updated prog chart for the big weather patterns, going and coming back.
• 3 days out. Check the prog chart for departure day and the MOS forecasts in your EFB. Plan your fuel and pick a bailout airport.
• Night before. GFA, TAFs and NOTAMs. File IFR and print the kneeboard.
• Day of. Standard briefing, final WX Score and a PAVE risk assessment. Then send the trip to Kneeboard Pro for frequencies, the airport diagram and approach plates.

Get the 7-Day Weather Strategy checklist, or open Kneeboard Pro. Weather monitoring is from PlaneWX.

Three additions to Kneeboard Pro, aimed squarely at volunteer pilots flying SkyHope missions.

• SkyHope itinerary import. Feed it the mission PDF and it builds the whole trip — legs, dates, tail number, frequencies — and puts the passenger manifest on its own sheet.
• PlaneWX hand-off. One tap sends the whole route to PlaneWX for the weather briefing, times converted to Zulu so you're briefing the day you're actually flying.
• Airport Notables. A sheet of what's odd about the field, in the FAA's own words — right-hand traffic, displaced thresholds, obstacle slopes, and the clearance-delivery phone number for airports where that's a call rather than a frequency.

Open Kneeboard Pro — or start with the volunteer pilot mission checklist.