How to Fly in Cold Weather

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village my name is Rodney Fielitz I'm a certified flight instructor in Cottonwood, AZ and I'm here to give you the basics of what it takes to become a pilot. We're located here in Arizona and it's very nice weather here, we're normally pretty warm but there's areas in the United States that have very extreme cold weather. So we have to also teach even though in Arizona we have to teach people what cold weather flying is. Cold weather flying there's a lot of problems that can go wrong with an airplane. Number one thing is ice, snow, freezing rain, so there's a list of items, in the easy they have what they call frost you get up in the morning and the airplane is all frosty. Well what does frost do to an airplane? It disturbs the airflow over the wings, so the airplane doesn't want to fly correctly and again we come back into the word stall, if the airplane isn't flying good it may stall on you and cause a lot of damage. So we have to teach cold weather flying airplanes that have calibrators we have what we call calibrators heat, and what it does it takes unfiltered air warm air from the exhaust and send it to the calibrator and keeps the calibrator warm and keeps all the moisture out of there. If you get calibrator ice in the airplane the engine starts running rough and you start getting a little panicky but the thing you do is pull on the carb heat give it some of that warm air and normally carb icing will go away. The worst thing is to fly into known icing which is against the law you are not to fly into known icing, if you do fly into known icing the thing to do is 180 and get out of there. And we will talk about weather we'll talk about all this stuff in ground school because once you're done with ground school and ready for your exam you will know how to give weather briefings, you will know what causes these moisture problems in the rains, and the snow and the big thing is when not to fly. This is probably the hardest thing to make students and pilots understand the decision of go or no go, and in cold weather the decision to go can be the last the decision that you make. But we try to teach you the common sense of when to say no, I don't need to be there, so what we want to do is teach you of how to fly safely in cold weather, and we have a hard time out here in Arizona but we still talk about it and the next thing is the decision making process."