Picture this: Flying home with your family, on a King Air. You have flown single engine airplanes before, but nothing as complex as a turbocharged, retractable gear, multi engined aircraft like the King Air.

You decide to travel in the co-pilots seat while the pilot of the aircraft takes off and flys you home.

10 Min after take-off, the pilot dies. What do you do?

This happened to Doug White. A video of his radar track and atc communications of the almost 40 min ordeal is a good watch.

SIgmets are a way of letting pilots know of dangerous flying conditions in a particular area. The danger could be thunderstorms, hail, a tornado, or even a radio active cloud! They are issued by Environment Canada and is disseminated to pilots over the radio by Flight Service Stations and ATC.

I’ve heard a sigmet broadcast over 126.7Mhz by London FSS one time. I wanted to play you an example but can’t seem to find a clip anywhere online. It went something like this:

“All stations, all stations, all stations, this is London …

I hope everyone has a good Holiday! Just a little something to get you in the mood..

The Song is called “Snoopy’s Christmas” by The Royal Guardsmen.

Pireps, or Pilot Reports, are a good way to disseminate timely and important information to other pilots and controllers.

A Pirep is used by pilots to let other pilots know of conditions that may not have been forecast or expected. For example, a pilot of a 747 might report turbulence so that air planes behind him can avoid it.

Another good use of pireps are at uncontrolled or unmanned airports. A pilot might submit a report letting other pilots know of the weather conditions at the airport.

Lets take a look at a …

LiveATC.net has recently added yet another southern Ontario airport to its list of feeds!

The addition of Oshawa brings the total up to four!

Oshawa is an interesting airport to listen to as it contains a lot of training traffic, plus the big-wigs from Ford landing their spiffy jets.

The Buttonville feed had been down for a few months, however it is now back up and sounding better than ever!

If you would like to listen to students practicing their ILS approaches, you can listen to the KItchener/Waterloo feed.

One big gap in the southern …

Flight planning is an integral part of learning how to fly an airplane. Personally, I think it’s one of the most important things that you learn as a pilot.

All during flight school you learned (painfully) how to plan your flight using good ole pencil and ruler. Everything from calculating the winds, to figuring out cross wind components, to converting from indicated to true airspeed was all possible using your E6B.

After I got my PPL I was looking for good (and cheap) flight planning software. It didn’t have to anything fancy. …

I had the pleasure of flying to Boston via Porter this past weekend. One of the best birthday presents ever! Thanks Sara!

We decided to take public transit all the way down to the Airport. Tip for those who live in Toronto: Catch the free Porter shuttle at the Royal York hotel, it’s much faster.

We checked in with a minimal of fuss before we hopped on the (ridiculous) ferry. It took us about 10 min to get through security. I put the blame on CATSA for that and not Porter. They …

I had the pleasure of getting a one-on-one tour at the Toronto Area Control Centre from a blog reader last week.

I had previously wrote about a group tour I had with one of my Seneca classes. Most of the information on that post is still relevant today.

This time around I was able to “plug-in” with a headset for an hour to listen to Joe do his magic as he worked the “airports” position. It was a quiet night, which was good for me as I was able to ask a …

NavCanada offers quite a bit of weather related services in addition to their regular air traffic control duties.

One of the features that I’ve started using is called PATWAS or Pilot’s Automated Telephone Weather Answering Service. PATWAS allows you to get a “poor mans” weather briefing over the telephone by having an automated system read you METARs, TAFs, SIGMETs, and other weather related data.

You can specify a single airport, or all the airports along your route, and it will read out all the necessary information. One other feature you can use …

So I was looking through the latest version of the CFS (December 17th, 2009) and the Barrie-Orillia (Lake Simcoe Regional) airport identifier has changed.

I popped on the airport’s website and they have confirmed it:

Effective December 17, 2009, the Lake Simcoe Regional Airport’s ICAO Identifier will change to CYLS, replacing the current identifier, CNB9.

I was always under the impression that the “real” airports didn’t have a number in their identifier. Guess Lake Simcoe Regional has “grown up!”

One of the cool things that this airport has (that I wish all …