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Plastic Pilot 
Symptoms of food intoxication can be felt 90 minutes after eating the poisoned food, as an average. So says my Human Performance book, and it was perfectly verified yesterday. I ate some chocolate wit
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Plastic Pilot
We all make mistakes, even me. Usually these mistakes are somehow caught and corrected by the system, and everything runs well. This applies not only to flying, but to all human activities. But someti
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Plastic Pilot
Flying is certainly an elegant and efficient way to travel, but it’s not the only one. Some “ground transportation vehicles” can be as exciting as planes. I’m not betraying the
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Plastic Pilot
Don’t say that to my aero-medical examiner (hello Dr. D), but I’m schyzophrenic, with a double personality. On one side, I’m a private pilot, and on the other side I’m an airpo
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Plastic Pilot
Pilots and Italians have one thing in common: they speak with their hands. Observe discussions in any airport café, you’ll immediately spot pilots using gestures to describe their last flying a
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Plastic Pilot
Today I’ll take you behind the dashboard. Not one of a plane, but the dashboard of this blog. Even with a motto aw wide as “General Aviation and Aviation in General”, producing one p
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Plastic Pilot
A freighter Boeing 747 crashed today on the runway, while taking-off from Brussels airport. The accident took place at 13:30 (local time), as the JumboJet was taking-off from runway 20. Some media rep
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Plastic Pilot
When I prepared my post about the new Cirrus Perspective, which includes G1000 and an upgraded autopilot, I read some info about an auto-pilot button labelled “LVL”, for wings-level. This
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Plastic Pilot
I recently read a forum discussion started by a student pilot who experienced a wing drop on final on a summer day, and he was wondering if it was a thermal or something else. Given how strong and loc
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Plastic Pilot
Each spring, Geneva airport hosts the EBACE (European Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition), one of the most important exhibition of its kind. It is the opportunity to see business jets, but
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Plastic Pilot
This post is the first in a series co-written with Jason Miller, the editor of
www.vectorstofinal.com. This series compares flying light aircraft in Europ
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Plastic Pilot
Today is full of news from the modern general aviation world. On the good side, Cirrus and G1000 finally meet, on the bad side, tensions between Diamond and Thielert get more serious.
Good thing first
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Plastic Pilot
Diamond announced last week the
first flight of the DA50 Magnum, the one equipped with the new Austro Engine AE 300 Jet-A1 piston
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Plastic Pilot
The proportion of European private pilots holding Instrument Flight privileges is low, particularly when compared to the US. Being of these seldom birds, other private pilots frequently ask me about i
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Plastic Pilot
As comments on the “
Do you listen to music while flying ?” post shown, many pilots like to fl
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Plastic Pilot
Aviation is technology and change resistant. It’s all about certification, validation safety studies, and so on. Given the expected results, this is not that bad, but this also leads to strange
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Plastic Pilot
Search more, you’ll find more. This principle perfectly applies to aviation resources on the web. I use to bookmark interesting aviation sites to later share them on this blog. There is a drawba
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Plastic Pilot
I don’t know any statistics about superstition (and don’t really want to know any), but the fact is here: many airlines are affected by superstitious passengers. Typically, most of them ha
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Plastic Pilot
According to a
report from FlightGlobal, Diamond
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Plastic Pilot
The weather here over the last two weeks was simply perfect for flying. Blue skies with a few benign clouds in the afternoon, and temperatures reaching the high 20’s (celsius). Air is dry, and i
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Plastic Pilot
The UK Aircraft Accident Investigation Branch (
AAIB) published today an update about the crash-landing of the Boeing 777 flying from Beijing to Heathrow as BA038 o
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Plastic Pilot
When I started this blog ancestor more than one year ago, I did not expected it to grow that big, nor to build a community of readers that frequently comment and take part to the discussion. I find it
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Plastic Pilot
If you’re an airshow fan, you probably already heard or (or went to) the Axalp. If not, let me give you a short description. This airshow takes place in the Swiss Alps, in the region of Brienz.
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Plastic Pilot
As a pilot, the challenging part in maintaining a proper level of theoretical knowledge is to find support material that is not too boring. Sorry, not too academical. The “Principles of Flight&#
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Plastic Pilot
When evaluating the value of an aircraft, one of the key factor is the TBO: Time Between Overhauls. Engine and propeller manufacturers define maximum time-in-service. The closer the engine / propeller
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Plastic Pilot
One of my activities while I was active in Geneva was to introduce practical radio-navigation to students, using the club simulator. This was a preparation for the radio-navigation part of the in-flig
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Plastic Pilot
In Switzerland, the route to a private pilot license goes through evening classes to prepare the theoretical examination. These are not always fun and animated - I know, I’ve been the “tea
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Plastic Pilot
Pilots have to keep track of their flight time in a logbook, which contains various columns for time spent in training, as pilot in command, co-pilot, in single engine or multi engine aircraft, by day
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Plastic Pilot
The title of this post may sound slightly evangelistic, but it is true: flying made me a better person. Ok, this is may be part of getting older (I started flying in my early 20s and I’m now in
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Plastic Pilot
This is the time before the next flight I planned in a light aircraft. This will be the longer interruption in my flying activities ever. Before starting training for my IFR, I went through a shorter
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Plastic Pilot
Pilots flying aircrafts with retractable landing gear must know three things: how to extend and retract it, the speed restriction for its operation… and the emergency extension procedure. As an
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Plastic Pilot
According to AOPA’s website,
Cessna will not deliver any C172 with Thielert engine in 2008
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Plastic Pilot
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know my opinion about distractions in cockpits (if not, read
