Critical Understanding Reference Page

Builders,

I am writing this as an index page for a number of articles to follow. As I write them, their titles will appear here in addition to being the lead story on my website.

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I cover a lot of topics on the website, but a review of working with builders this year has focused my attention on a simple fact: We have too many builders operating planes taking enormous unnecessary risks, often without really thinking about it. These builders are a product of two factors that didn’t affect previous generations of pilots: Today we have badly eroded standards of instruction in light aviation, and second, we are in an era that invests more interest in avionics and paint jobs than fundamentals of intelligent decision making.

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While I can make the case that Corvair builders are far better than average, I don’t teach with the goal of merely beating a sadly lowered bar. My goal is the traditional aviation standard, mastery. Any builder who is willing to read and consider with an open mind can greatly reduce his risk and that of his passengers, for whom he is solely responsible for. That will not fix people who don’t care, but it will teach you to recognize such people and give them a wide berth.

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If that sounds harsh, consider how serious the subject is, and tell me who would be served my me sugar coating it?  We have had a number of aircraft destroyed and some people killed, by pilots who doing indefensibly stupid things. Notice, I didn’t say they were stupid people, just that they were doing stupid things in an environment with serious penalties for bad logic, impatience, and lack of understanding.

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My #1 goal for this year is to have a very high percentage of builders read, understand, and utilize the information in  these articles. I want to encourage builders to develop their own POH for their plane and print and keep these notes as a manual. To develop their basic hand book I will write questions in this color and font: (Make your own hand book) at the end of each article for builders to answer and form the basis of their handbooks.

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  Other companies might be happy just selling parts, but I have always been motivated to share what I have learned. How important is this? I spend a large part of my working year on educational tasks like writing and Colleges, neither of which generates a dime.  Preventable accidents ruin the reputation of Corvairs, make insurance more costly, lower sales that cover the costs of Colleges, wreck planes, injure people , occasionally kill  builders, and worst, they have hurt and killed passengers. If anyone objects to how plainly I am going to speak in these articles, please direct them back to this paragraph and point out to them when I said it polite enough for Girl Scouts, many people thought listening was optional.

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 With the goal of minimizing this in 2017 and beyond, We have this index page and the articles that will be linked here. -ww.

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Read: Thought for the Day: Mastery or?

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Critical Understanding #1, Take off distance.

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Critical Understanding #2, Absolute Minimum Static RPM.

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Critical Understanding #3, Rate of Climb, the critical prop evaluation.

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Critical Understanding #4, ANY loss of RPM is Detonation.

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Critical Understanding #5, Knowing “+ROC/5” Rate of Climb on Five cylinders

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Critical Understanding #6, The “Two Minute Test”

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Critical Understanding #7, The Most Qualified Pilot, ALONE.

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