Sporty’s webinar video: 20 questions to test your IFR knowledge

Sporty's John Zimmerman hosts a fun, fast-paced hour of IFR flying questions and tips, covering everything from approach charts to weather theory.

Keeping One Step Ahead of ATC when flying IFR

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Gone are the days of making an educated guess on a route, only to have ATC respond with a full route clearance with intersections and airways. It now takes only a moment in ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot or FltPlan.com to enter a departure and destination airport and then see recently issued clearances to other aircraft flying the same route.

ILS approach with Spencer Suderman to Jacksonville Int’l

The Instrument Landing System (ILS) is a precision approach that provides instrument pilots with both lateral and vertical guidance to a runway. In this video, Spencer Suderman demonstrates what it's like to fly an ILS in a Cessna 172 with a Garmin G1000 avionics system, and how to use the runway approach lighting system to descend below the decision altitude and find the runway when the ceiling is less than 200' AGL.

How to prepare for checkride day

Communication is key to the examiner understanding your thought process and decision making. Checkrides have plenty of emotion and pressure that will hopefully allow you to excel. Don’t bring unnecessary pressure or emotion to the flight by overreaching or trying to do too much. Fly like you’ve trained and be the PIC.

Interactive exercise: Unusual attitude recovery procedures

It's important for pilots to recognize the conditions or situations that could cause an unusual attitude, with focus on how to recognize one, and how to recover from one. Test your knowledge of unusual attitude recognition and recovery with this interactive exercise.

Understanding TEC routes in busy IFR airspace — Advanced IFR, by Pilot Workshops

The flight will utilize and explain a Tower Enroute Control (TEC) route which is an FAA program of standard routes that keep a flight solely within approach control airspace instead of working with air route traffic control centers.

Combining IFR and visual flight

If we didn’t have access to the variety of visual IFR procedures or the option for VFR flight, the system would quite simply be overwhelmed. Where the breakdowns and inefficiencies occur, can often be attributed to a lack of awareness on the part of pilots or failure to take advantage of our options for combining IFR and VFR flight.

Sporty’s webinar video: Using a Home Simulator for IFR Proficiency

Home flight simulators offer a wealth of training situations to sharpen a pilot's aircraft operating skills. Instrument flying is one of the most valuable scenarios we can practice in a standard home simulator. Join Sporty's own Chris McGonegle as he covers how to configure Instrument flights in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and X-Plane 12.
Clearance

How to get an IFR clearance at a non-towered airport

Flying a light airplane offers access to thousands more airports than the airlines serve, which means you can land closer to your destination, avoid long taxi routes, and save time. For an instrument pilot, though, there is one key difference between a smaller, non-towered airport and a larger one with an air traffic control tower: obtaining an IFR clearance.

Basic attitude instrument flying – the foundation for IFR flight

As the complete instrument pilot, you should be able to maintain heading, altitude, and airspeed at speeds ranging from cruise to approach. Within the normal speed range of an airplane, there are many combinations of power and pitch which will maintain altitude at different airspeeds.