As a pilot, it is my responsibility to be current in all of the tasks required for the safe operation of an aircraft. To ensure that this happens safely and consistently, the FAA put together criteria that must be met in order to be considered legal and current. These requirements get even more stringent when dealing with instrument flying. When you are flying in bad weather conditions, and you only have your instruments to guide you, being current in your knowledge of your flying platform and operating within the national airspace system is incredibly important.

However, something that is often overlooked goes beyond mere legal currency … and that is proficiency. For instance, approaching the end of my initial 6-month instrument currency, I can choose to fly all of the required instrument procedures in one day and be current for another 6 months. I can neglect to fly any approaches for almost another 6 months and then repeat at the end of that period. However, whenever I do fly in the middle of that gap of time, there’s a good chance that I’ll be pretty rusty, as most of my currency flying is done in burst separated by large chunks of time. To improve at any task, instrument flying included, continuous and consistent practice is needed. Put simply one must not only be current … but also proficient.

For a pilot that does not fly on instruments for a living, or perhaps does not have access to their own personal aircraft, maintaining proficiency usually involves renting an aircraft of some kind and flying approaches as often as possible. I can only speak for myself, but my checkbook finds it difficult to handle that kind of strain. The same applies for renting time in most commercial simulators. Another option is to use a PC based simulator. While this has the advantages of being relatively inexpensive … it’s pretty challenging to use it like you would an actual aircraft. It involves copious amounts of mouse use and in most circumstances I find myself frustrated wishing that I could reach through the screen and just interact with the switches directly.

It was this frustration that led me to start building an external x-plane radio and ultimately set me on the path to building a full-scale cockpit. There are several examples of these online and while impressive, they take a fair amount of money to construct. I’ll be building something somewhat simpler and with any luck a great deal cheaper. To start with I’ve started work on a PJRC Teensy based radio that will in the least let me change radio frequencies without losing my mind.

More on that at another time. For now, I’ve put together a prototype and as I go forward I’ll be releasing my code so that anyone can take it and do it themselves. Better yet I hope others will be able to take what I’ve done and improved on it. This blog has been fairly dead for a while but I hope to have more on here as I go forward. The ADS-B receiver project is still going and I will be posting about that again soon as well.