Military Flying
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Currency and the Professional Pilot
A reader has asked me an interesting and somewhat complicated question concerning flying currency for both military and civilian professional pilots especially when coupled with the life expectancy of various airframes and allowable budgets. Wow. I don’t know, but I would guess that even a small part of that topic has been the subject of…
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Stopping by for Fuel
The weather finally broke for a couple of days just before I left for work so I headed out to the airport to see how the hangar and airplane had weathered the recent storms. As I drove into the airport I saw a dark colored tailwheel airplane entering the pattern in a manner not usually…
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Spin Training II – the Cessna T-37
In part one of this two-part series on spin training in the Cessna T-37 I covered some of the spin characteristics of the T-37 and the six-step procedure that we used to recover from an established spin. I didn’t address the aerodynamics of spins, since there are several other sites which cover that subject in…
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Spin Training I – the Cessna T-37
A recent AOPA ePilot newsletter included a segment about an incident where a female flight instructor and her student were killed accomplishing spin training. Preliminary indications are that the larger male student may have frozen at the controls during a spin recovery. Additionally, the August 2009 Instructor Report (AOPA member sign-in required) from Flight Training…
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DNIF
The military seems to have an acronym for everything. If you went to the doctor, better known to military pilots as the flight surgeon, and the doctor said that you were not in a physical condition suitable for flying you were then placed on DNIF status or Duty Not Including Flying. In the military if…
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Adventures on the Air Refueling Track
The last two posts covered all the procedural steps necessary to accomplish an air refueling mission or qualification. Completing an AR mission is an exercise in flying formation with another aircraft, specifically in close trail formation. Just as in any other formation flying, maintaining position involves recognizing relative movement between the airplanes and managing the…