Memory Items: The Backbone

Commit these to memory before training starts if you can. They’re the backbone of almost everything you’ll do in the airplane and on the oral, and knowing them up front steepens your learning curve dramatically. If some of it doesn’t make sense yet, that’s fine: it will after the ground lessons. This is a guided process.

Flows and mental checklists

Paper checklists are the most common, and also the sloppiest (“fat finger syndrome”: skipping a line without noticing). Flows and memory checks back them up. You’ll use checklists for preflight, before start, start, run-up, before takeoff, climb, cruise, descent, before landing, after landing and shutdown.

VOR navigation in six steps

Tune the frequency → Identify the Morse code → Twist the OBS (center the needle with FROM to find your radial, with TO to fly direct) → Turn to an intercept heading → Intercept: turn on course as the needle centers → Track it.

Fitness for flight

• IMSAFE: Illness, Medication, Stress, Alcohol, Fatigue, Emotion
• 5 P’s: Plane, Pilot, Passengers, Plan, Programming
• Alcohol §91.17: at least 8 hours bottle-to-throttle, under 0.04% BAC, and not under the influence. Many pilots use 12–24 hours as a personal minimum.

Oxygen §91.211

• Crew: required above 12,500 ft MSL cabin altitude for flights over 30 minutes at those altitudes
• Crew: required at all times above 14,000 ft
• Passengers: oxygen must be provided above 15,000 ft
• The FAA recommends oxygen above 10,000 ft by day and 5,000 ft at night.

Weather facts

• METARs are hourly observations, usually issued around :53 past the hour. A SPECI is issued when conditions change significantly.
• TAFs are forecasts, issued four times a day (every 6 hours) and valid for 24 or 30 hours.
• AIRMETs: Sierra (IFR and mountain obscuration), Tango (turbulence, strong surface winds, LLWS), Zulu (icing and freezing levels). Hazardous mainly to light aircraft, like ours.
• SIGMETs and Convective SIGMETs: hazardous to all aircraft.
• Standard atmosphere: 15 °C (59 °F) and 29.92 inHg at sea level; temperature drops about 2 °C per 1,000 ft.
• Cloud bases: when temp/dewpoint spread is 4 °C or less and closing, watch for fog and low clouds. Estimate the base: (temp − dewpoint in °C) ÷ 2.5 × 1,000 ft AGL. Example: 10 °C / 5 °C → 5 ÷ 2.5 = 2 → about 2,000 ft AGL.

Speeds and altitudes

Airspeeds: Indicated (on the gauge) → Calibrated (corrected for instrument and position error; chart in your POH) → True (calibrated corrected for altitude and temperature: your speed through the air mass) → Ground speed (true airspeed corrected for wind).

Altitudes: Indicated (on the altimeter) · True (above mean sea level) · Absolute (above ground level) · Pressure (altimeter set to 29.92) · Density (pressure altitude corrected for non-standard temperature; the one your airplane’s performance cares about, and a factor in many crashes).

Aerodynamics in one breath

• Bernoulli: as velocity increases, pressure decreases. Faster air over the top of the wing means lower pressure, and that’s lift.
• An airfoil is any surface designed to produce lift.
• A stall happens when you exceed the critical angle of attack: airflow over the top separates and lift drops sharply. It can happen at any airspeed and any attitude.

Fuel and charts

• 100LL avgas is blue; Jet A is clear to straw-colored and smells like kerosene. Never put Jet A in a piston engine.
• VFR charts: Terminal Area Charts (1:250,000) and Sectionals (1:500,000). Free online at SkyVector.
• Learn the phonetic alphabet until it’s automatic: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie… Zulu.