How to brief the weather before an IFR flight (video tip)

The FAA encourages pilots to conduct a self-weather briefing before each flight and no longer considers a Flight Service phone briefing as the primary source for preflight weather. In this video, we'll highlight various sources of weather products you can use and how to ensure you always get a complete briefing.

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 choose an alternate airport when planning an IFR flight

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There are a lot of factors that go into choosing an alternate airport when filing an IFR flight plan. Here we'll take a deep dive at the approach and alternate minimums charts and look at the legal and practical considerations to help you make the best decision.

Strategies for maintaining instrument proficiency

While your instrument flying skills, cockpit management techniques, and risk management processes will no doubt be sharp when you earn your instrument rating, like anything in life, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

Airplane attitude instrument flying is the foundation

When the airplane is properly trimmed, the control pressures needed for these small pitch changes are very light. The most common error in both pitch and bank control is over controlling.  Just as an excessive climb or descent will cause you to overshoot altitude, an excessive rate of turn results in overshooting the target heading.

Keeping One Step Ahead of ATC when flying IFR

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.