Here’s the list of websites and other resources that I talked about in the EAA AirVenture forum presentation this Wednesday. The talk titled ‘The Internet for Pilots – to Twitter and beyond!’. It was divided into a few different sections, the first part was intro material and didnt have any links, then we got into the main content:

Training & Safety

1. FAAsafety.gov – home to the Wings program, listings of aviation events, courses and seminars, the Learning Center and much more.
2. SPANS – sign up here to get into the FAASafety.gov system and receive notifications of events, participate in the Wings program, etc.
3. Aviation learning Center – Search here for lots of great aviation information – courses, documents, etc.
4. On Landings Part 1 – Part 1 of a series looking at common landing errors and how to fix them, co-authored and illustrated by William Kershner
5. On Landings Part 2
6. On Landings Part 3
7. FAA.gov – main FAA website with lots and lots of information, including downloadable PDF manuals and handbooks
8. AOPA Air Safety Foundation – many great safety resources
9. Nall Report – Analysis of accident causes and trends for 2007.
10. ASF interactive courses – flash-based tutorials covering weather, communication, charts and much more.

Preflight

1. Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS) – the main government weather site for aviation.
2. Navmonster.com – Another alternative site for weather data, can be advert-heavy.
3. AeroWeather – Free iPhone app for Metar and Taf data
4. Skyvector.com – Explore sectionals, area charts and IFR charts using google maps interface – weather and route planning also.
5. NACO digital Terminal Procedures Publications (d-TPP) – Download PDFs of IFR approach plates, SIDS, STARS, airport diagrams, A/FD pages, Chart Users Guide.
6. AOPA Airports guide for iPhone (AOPA Members only)
7. Google Earth – Review your airport and route in 3D and with satellite imagery, also for the iPhone
8. AOPA Flight Planner (AOPA Members only)

Social Networking sites for Aviation

1. AOPA Forums (AOPA Members Only)
2. Studentpilot.com Bulletin Board – active forums on a wide variety of topics
3. Facebook – Many aviation groups and sites including EAA, Skyvector
4. Oshkosh365 – EAA’s social networking site, for EAA members and non-members, blogs and great weather display
5. Twitter – micro-blogging in 140 characters or less, follow the #OSH09 hash tag, my tweets: @simon_t
6. AvWeb YouTube video clip of A380 cross-wind landing
7. Twitter Stream Graphs of #OSH09 tags (created using Neoformix.com StreamGraph tool)
8. Blogs – too many to mention individually but check out bloggingpilots.com for a list of many great sites.
9. Podcasts – lots of these too, try searching iTunes for ‘pilot’ and/or ‘aviation’
10. UND Aerocast – video tutorials demonstrating many flight maneuvers, instrument technique and more

Thanks to my fellow Milwaukee pilots and aviation folks who turned up last night at Gran Aire to listen to my practice run for next week’s Oshkosh forum presentation. We had around twenty people in the Skyroom – not bad for a last minute, friday night event! I got some great feedback and suggestions from the audience and it was very helpful for me to have a run through the material.

I’ll be compiling a list of the websites and resources that I mention (and some of the many that I cant fit in) so that people don’t have to take notes, plus it will be handy for people who cant make it. I will remember to use laser pointer and to bring the remote control and other accessories that help these things go more smoothly. Hopefully the screenshots, etc. will be visible on the projectors… we shall see!

Simon.

Airventure 2009

If you are going to be at Airventure in Oshkosh in a couple of weeks, I’m giving a presentation entitled Internet for Pilots, to Twitter and beyond! on Wednesday, July 27th. It will be in the Utah Valley University Pavillion from 4 to 5.15pm.

I’ll be covering some of the great Internet resources out there for pilots at all stages in their aviation career: training and safety, weather, flight planning, charts and navigation and more. I’ll go into some of the cool new mobile applications coming out for the iphone and talk about how social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and others can be great tools to stay in touch with aviation even when you aren’t at the airport.

I’m going to try and work in some observations I have made over the years of test prep results from preparetotest.com – there are some questions and topics people keep getting wrong as they are learning to fly and these are often areas critical to flight safety that continue to cause problems in the pilot community after folks are licensed. I’m going to highlight some of these along with the resources that can help

If you are going to be in Oshkosh, drop me an email or I’m on Twitter as @simon_t, it would be great to meet up!

Here’s the current draft of the contents and some of the main sites I’ll be talking about. Clearly there are many other great sites, blogs, podcasts, etc. out there and I cant cover them all – please don’t be offended if your favorite site isn’t on this list. That being said, if you have other sites you think everyone really should know about, I’d love to hear about them. Time is limited for the talk so I may already have more than enough to cover but I can always keep a longer list online.

• FAASafety.gov & the WINGS program
• Resources for Training – Safety & Education
  • AOPA – Air Safety Foundation, FlightTraining magazine
  • FAA – Handbooks, Manuals, Library, FAA Safety.gov, NASA ASRS
  • Licensing/Test Prep – Sportys, PrepareToTest (RSS feeds), MyWrittenExam, etc.
  • Aerodynamics – See How it Flys, John Denker,
  • Online nav simulators – E6B Sims, VOR Sims
  • Podcasts & Videos – UND Aerocast, The Finer Points (audio & video), Airspeed, UCAP, Pilots Flight PodLog, Pilots Journey
• Preflight – resources to help you get ready to fly and keep you informed en route
  • Weather – ADDS, Aviation Weather
  • Airport Information – d-TERPS, A/FD online, AirNav, AOPA Airport Directory (iPhone)
  • Navigation – Planners (EAA, AOPA, DUATS)
  • Charts – Skyvector, NACO, NACO Charts User guide
  • iPhone Apps – Weather, Flight planning, etc.
• Postflight – Online hanger flying, community building and more
  • Facebook – EAA Groups
  • Twitter  – #OSH09, #pilot, #aviation
  • Oshkosh 365
  • AOPA Members Forums
  • StudentPilot.com
  • Blogs – Blogging Pilots, AOPA Lets go Flying, GirlsWithWings

I’ve built a basic twitterbot behind the @av8nwx twitter account as a way for pilots to get access to aviation weather reports via Twitter. I’ve been testing it over the past few weeks and it seems to work pretty well so Im going to send out some tweets about it and see if others find it handy. Information on how to use the system and what it can do are on the av8nwx page.

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So its currently Thursday night, the flyout is planned for Saturday morning, around 36h from now. Weather and route briefing at 7.30, wheels up around 8.30AM en route to C77 in Northern Illinois. ‘Wheels up’ is perhaps a little pretentious given I’m in a C152 but it sounds good! On the ride to work this morning the weather folks on the local radio said that weather for the weekend was looking a little dicey. This is not really what you want to hear when you are looking forward to a flight but you never know what’s going to happen until you get there.

As its getting closer to Saturday and the forecasts will start to be closer to reality, I’m looking at ADDS (Aviation Digital Data Service, http://adds.aviationweather.noaa.gov) to see what’s in store. For this type of time frame, 36 hours out, I start on the Prog (Prognostic) Charts and see what’s going on. Here’s an overview of all the current charts:

Even at this resolution you can see there’s a Low pressure over east-central Canada that’s dragging a cold front through the north central states and as the Low moves to the east, that cold front is going to start dropping down into the midwest and potentially messing up our plans. Here’s the current 48 hour forecast:

I’m using the 48h chart rather than the 36h chart because the valid time of the 48h chart is around about my planned departure time of 0830 CDT on Sat June 6th.

Looking at the current chart things dont look clean cut. We’re flying from SE Wisconsin to North Central Illinois and on this map the cold front should have just passed through. The solid green line indicates that SW WI and NW IL will have a 30-50% chance of some precipitation, though the real stuff is on the north western side of IA. The Low in eastern Iowa is on an stationary front (changing to a cold front in Northern IL, indicated by the two yellow lines across the front) and the isobars dont look too close together so its not likely to be very windy. To me (and Im thinking out loud, quite likely to be wrong!) this might suggest we’re going to have some clouds to think about. We’ll be around 4,500′ on the way out (westbound) and probably 3,500′ on the way back (eastbound) so they may be higher than us (hopefully, C152 isnt really my ideal IFR platform and Im not current at the moment)

So, that’s where we are at this stage of the game but everything will change as tomorrow progresses. Things Im going to look for: progress of the Canadian low and its cold front, visibility in northern IL ahead of the cold front. The Milwaukee (KMKE) and Rockford TAFs (KRFD) will start to become relevant tomorrow as their 30h forecasts start to reach our flight times on Saturday morning so I’ll look again tomorrow night and we should have a better idea of what’s going on.

I hope things are decent enough – I picked up a Sony Webbie HD camcorder from BestBuy this afternoon and the plan is to strap this to the top of the passenger seat and videotape the trip – we’ll see how it goes! Grrr – while making the link to the camera on Amazon I found it has an undocumented ‘feature’, a 25min maximum record time, how annoying is that! You have to restart the video every 25mins, it’s not the end of the world but not what you really want. I do like the swivelling head…well, we’ll see, this bad boy may be heading back to the store and I’ll end up with the Flip UltraHD after all…

One of the fun things that happens at Timmerman (KMWC), our local airport are the flyouts organized by the flight school, Gran Aire. This coming saturday we are planning to fly down to northern Illinois to the Poplar Grove airport (C77) for their pancake breakfast held in conjunction with the Army Wings and Wheels weekend.

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This is the first post on the new blog! Im moving my aviation related posts  from my FAA test prep site at http://preparetotest.com and putting some of them here in a blog of their own. This is mainly because Im doing a redesign at PrepareToTest and also because I wanted to expand a bit on some topics and go in a few different directions.

So way back in 1999 I got my Private Pilot’s license with my instrument rating the following year. It seems like I’ve been working on my Commercial ever since – real life has conspired to make finding the time to get that done rather hard. Taking a different tack, last year I passed my Instrument Ground Instructor and now I’m working on my Advanced Ground Instructor – the goal is to have that completed before Oshkosh. I hope to be chatting about progress towards that goal and other bits and pieces as I go along.

So, thanks for stopping by and hopefully there will be more to see here when you return!

• Logging into http://faasafety.gov
• Navigating to your My Wings page
• Finding the seminar or event you attended
• Finding a validator who can confirm your attendance at that event
• Submitting the request to the validator

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Was That For Us?

To help address the problem of runway incursions the FAA co-produced a DVD in conjunction with the Airline Pilots Association and United Airlines. This video is reproduced below and focuses on runway safety best practices for commercial operations at towered and non-towered airports.
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The latest edition of the FAA Aviation Safety newsletter just came out and it has some nice articles in it. This is well worth subscribing to if you don’t already have a subscription.

http://www.faa.gov/news/aviation_news/2008/media/MarApr2008.pdf

You can find more information on FAA Aviation News, links to their past editions and info on how to subscribe to their print edition here:

http://www.faa.gov/news/aviation_news/