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Those young kids on bicycles get a lot more practice. Rollout, flare, and landing last 5–10 seconds, so after your first 100 flights, you still have only 10 or 15 minutes' experience actually landing (add a bit for touch and goes).

Fully agree. The elevator controls angle of attack*, and any given angle of attack/weight/G-load combination requires a certain amount of power to maintain level flight. Any excess power gets converted to a climb, and a power deficit results in a descent. Q.E.D. (* With a low horizontal...

Not the same as mine, but very similar.

Thanks! And to add to the fun, I don't think the FAA or TC apply their silly new "stabilized approach" standards until you're established on final — perhaps any American or instructors can let me know if I'm wrong — so you can do a safer and more natural (for light pistons) 6° glidepath on the...

I had an old Magellan GPS with a tiny display and a set of open-data aviation waypoints (airports and navaids) that I hacked together. What an improvement when I finally splurged on a Garmin 196 a couple of years later.

A 3° glideslope is about 200 ft for every half mile. Makes for a long downwind and a wide pattern, because you'll need to fly 2.5 nm (± winds) to lose 1,000 ft.

That's fair. As I mentioned, I just assumed it from the fact that the pilot seems never to have considered pulling the phone out of his pocket. It's a common attitude in flight training — using many of the tools you'll be using every flight after you get your license (and really need to learn to...

More seriously, "cheating" is a dangerous word. A number of years ago, a student on his commercial cross country and his passenger died when they got way off course flying. they stopped at my home airport to refuel, then somehow got their heading off — I think the compass in the rental plane (a...

One could say that a gyro compass is cheating, too — what happened to timing turns? — but most of us don't cover that up during pilotage. ;)

There's a middle position where you leave the GPS on for situational awareness, but don't draw a magneta line.

So I think the answer is that it depends on what you own, where you live, and what's available. Where I live, even if I could find a hangar, I'd have to drive a lot further, and the cost difference would be enough to repaint my plane every few years. Planes seem to do better outside in colder...

Beans and blood pudding for breakfast.

All that cracked plastic, hazing, etc. makes it sound like they're leaving the planes outside without a canopy cover, which is always a bad idea. You don't want to let any U/V into the interior. Am I right in guessing that Florida hangars are sealed and air-conditioned/dehumidified 24/7, and...

Some versions of the Spot interfere with Garmin WAAS GPS antennas if they are too close (eg up on the dash). I had to get rid of mine because it caused my GTN 650 to lose satellites every 10 min.

The biggest benefit of a canopy cover is protecting the interior from UV. The benefit of wing and elevator/stabilator covers is being able to remove ice and snow without scraping against the paint. The benefit of an insulated cowl cover is keeping heat in from a preheater. For all of these, the...

Most airplanes around here (Ottawa, Canada) are tied down outside all year. Almost all of them have canopy covers and cowl plugs, and in the winter, wing and elevator/stabilator covers. Paint still lasts for decades, and the planes don't seem have have any more problems than hangared planes...

Good catch. I had it in all my other posts in this thread, but let it slip from that one.

Aside from the tiny minority of GA piston aircraft that have altitude-compensating fuel systems (which do the leaning for you), when would you take off from an 8,000 ft density-altitude field with the mixture set to full rich with a normally-aspirated engine? I'm always happy to learn new things.

Nobody who flies from a high-elevation airport would take off with the mixture full rich (or at least, Darwin quickly weeds out the ones who do), but I suspect some pilots haven't yet made the connection that (say) 8,000 ft density altitude looks the same to your engine when you've climbed up...

When you're 20, you think you know everything; when you're almost 60, you may know 10x as much, but (hopefully) along the way you've acquired the wisdom to realize you still know almost nothing.