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Suppose you are flying into an airport with a VASI. When the VASI is in sight and you are descending on it, what should be your rate of descent? AIM 2−1−2. Visual Glideslope Indicators 2. Two−bar VASI installations provide one visual glide path which is normally set at 3 degrees. Three−bar VASI installations provide two […]

A recent post on Aviation Stack Exchange asked whether pilots need to be good at maths. The short answer is that you don’t really need any advanced math skills—although they sometime help to understand things—but you do need to have good arithmetic skills, an understanding of compass points, and an understanding of how graphs and […]

Most pilots in the US are more familiar with temperature in degrees Fahrenheit than in degrees Celsius as reported in METARs, with the winds aloft forecasts, and in most aviation reports. And most pilots that I know don’t think in Celsius but need to make the conversion to Fahrenheit. If you know a couple of […]

Finding the reciprocal of a compass heading. The easiest way to find the opposite direction on a compass is to use a two step process. If the current direction is less than 180, add 200 and then subtract 20. If the current heading is greater than 180, subtract 200 then add 20. So for a […]