Open course ware

PHILIP GREENSPUN: There is no pizza for me because I'm going to talk about Oshkosh. So what is it? It's end of July every year at a big, a physically big, but otherwise not very busy airport in Wisconsin. And about 10,000 airplanes come in. People camp out. People hang out, usually at least 100,000 people a day. There's a Boeing. There's a C-17 cargo plane. A lot of experimental-- it's founded by the Experimental Aircraft Association. So there's a lot of people who are passionate about home-building there. You can see all the airplanes parked. There's 12,000 camping sites, 40,000 campers. There's 1,500 workshops and seminars that you can take to learn. Or you can just walk around and talk to people, and hang out. So I planned this trip for me and my friend Ray. He's a helicopter pilot from Ireland. And the idea was to fly to Niagara Falls and show him Niagara Falls, and on the way back go up to Mackinac Island. They saw automobiles abou...

PHILIP GREENSPUN: We're going to talk about meteorology. So as pilots, we're just trying to understand the basics. And in terms of passing the exam, you don't need to be a physicist. You just mostly are trying to learn stuff that will help you fly within the VFR weather minimums and predict when those minimums aren't likely to be met or when there's going to be really serious hazards, such as thunderstorms. All right, this will be on the test. You have to memorize all of this. Well, you kind of do. Anyways, they want you-- you will have to learn some of this stuff for the exam. In reality around here, almost all airspace is at least class echo. That's controlled airspace. It means controllers could give you a clearance to fly on instruments and separate you from other aircraft. So they want you to be well separated from clouds, 1,000 feet above, 500 feet underneath, 2,000 horizontally. That way, if an aircraft under IFR comes out of the clouds, the...

PHILIP GREENSPUN: All right. We're going to go in and outline, how do you navigate an airplane? It's become a lot easier now in the GPS age, but you still have to know a little bit about how people used to do it in the old days, partly to pass the exam, and partly because it's interesting. All right. So we're going to talk about looking out the window. That's called pilotage, planning your flight and then looking out the window. We'll talk about the old non-directional beacons, basically homing in on a radio station. In the 1950s, there was something called the VOR that we'll talk about that lets you figure out exactly your magnetic heading to or from a radio station. And finally, the way that most people get around these days, the GPS and the moving map. OK. So when you're doing pilotage, you come up in advance with a bunch of visual landmarks that you think you'll be able to see from the air. You're going to cross a river. You...

PHILIP GREENSPUN: All right, so a complicated aircraft will have a lot of systems. These are the systems from the Canadair Regional Jet. How well did that I fly it? We landed it once in Toronto, and I was doing this, and the captain said to me, well-- he was a young guy-- he said, well, you know nobody was born knowing how to fly a 53,000-pound jet. But anyway, this is the kind of stuff you have to learn for the big aircraft. Here are these systems that we're going to talk about that you have on a small aircraft. The engine, first of all, what are the types? You might remember the cool old days. You had these big radio engines, and they went up to 3,500 horsepower, I think, was the biggest one. But your typical World War Ii fighter might have a 2000 horsepower-ish radial engine. Turboprops, so we'll get into this more. I have a special lecture on turbines and multi-engine. But it's a jet engine that's hooked into a propeller, and that lets you land on shor...