Free Online Courses For All Pilots

Ah, winter. Flight cancellations, slippery conditions, your fingers freezing to Dzus fasteners or feeling the blast of 13-degree avgas when you drain fuel. Throw in "three foot high snow banks" (says my ATIS), and ground icing. Not to mention conditions very, very conducive to in-flight icing. Which brings us to the matter at hand. How much do you know about icing?

Is it enough?

As you may know, NASA has spent a fortune on aeronautical research, including a lot of bold, innovative research about icing. They have a lot of bright people working on this -- guys with more degrees than the ambient atmosphere has to offer right now. Wouldn't it be cool if all that egg-head research was put into a simple form so that pilots could learn what it practically means to us?

Well, it turns out, the PhDs are out in front on that, too. NASA's Glenn Research Center, the place in charge of all that high-end icing research, has got two excellent courses available.

A Pilot's Guide to Ground Icing is aimed at pro pilots -- mostly in the corporate and charter world -- who make their own de-icing decisions. (In general, airline pilots have at least part of the decision taken from them by procedures in the operations manual). That doesn't mean it isn't informative for others, but if you fly a Piper Tomahawk and are calling for the deice truck, something's not quite right.

A Pilot's Guide to In-Flight Icing is aimed at GA pilots who fly planes with known-icing equipment. I'm taking this course as I write this and recommend it -- I'm learning a lot that I didn't know about ice, although my take-away message is still where I began: I do not want to mess with that stuff. I admit it, I am an icing coward. Nothing in the course is making me any braver.

But I am getting smarter. I'd never considered supercooled droplets before, and while I knew of ice-induced tail stall, I never really thought it through before.

You get the sense of ice as almost a malevolent creature out there, cunningly snaking its way through our countermeasures. Got boots? Ha! Supercooled droplets laugh at your boots. They land anywhere on your airfoil and freeze in place, causing grim buildups behind the boot line and destroying the laminar flow needed to keep you above ground. It doesn't help the imaginative student, that heavy ice forms not a single protrusion on your leading edge but a Satanic pair of horns.

There are some truly chilling stop-action films of ice forming on wing and tail surfaces, with matching graphic animations so that you can see how airfoils like the ones on your plane fare.

But the In-Flight Icing guide doesn't just help you know the enemy; it truly helps you understand him, with the latest research in ice formation -- and the latest forecasting tools for pilots -- explained in terms that anyone can understand. So once the presentation scares the living daylights out of you, it gives you the tools you need to defend your plane and passengers against this cold enemy.

This is not like one of AOPA's courses that you can knock out in forty minutes, as good as they are. It's going to take some time to do.

Fortunately, there's a mechanism for doing it a piece at a time. I still haven't finished, but I am so impressed with this course that I feel that I can recommend it unreservedly; and I don't think I'm going very far out on a limb by assuming that the ground icing course is of similar quality, and recommending that, too.

I have already emailed this to some of my CFI & ATP friends, including a weather instructor at a major aviation school, and the feedback has been universally positive.

Both courses are free. If you're an American taxpayer you paid for it already. If you're a citizen of some other country, accept it as a gift from us, because air safety, like weather, knows no borders.

The courses were developed with Macromedia Flash, and you can run them on the web or download them to run on your own computer. (They work on any system that can run Flash; I've run them on Windows PCs and Macs).

FMI: A Pilot's Guide To Ground Icing