Your flying year, 2013

a sortie = a flight of a combat aircraft on a mission = an operational flight made by one (military) aircraft

From sortir (being a feminine past participle in Old French) = to go out, apparently

You mean a Meridian, not a Jetprop? The latter has more range. You may also check out P210N Turbine Silver Eagle. I fly one. It is pressurized, has 1200 NM range, great payload and sucks only about 23 GPH. 200 KTAS on FL200.

I am doing the Jetprop DLX conversion.

So what do they all mean in this thread about sorties? Are they all flying operational flights or even combat flights?

A Jetprop has to have a range at least as good as an SR22. It’s almost as good as a TB20

I used to read the forum on jetprop.com and some people there have reported some very good range figures.

People just use the term “sorties” to mean flights. It’s something that (here in the UK) gets carried through from the military side. It is true that a sortie could be a combat mission, but then when the RAF are training pilots each training flight is also dubbed a “sortie” and then when these pilots teach civilians they still call them “sorties” and it just carries through a bit.

What next, about logging IFR and actual instrument time, we are only required by EASA to log time spent operating IFR which of course can be in perfect VMC, however there were I believe a few things which previously required a certain amount of actual IF time (I can’t remember what exactly now, and I may not even be correct). Because of this thought I always made a note of time spent flying with sole reference to instruments, which is as you know difficult to do unless you are obsessive and have a stopwatch to hand always. I just make a rough estimate of it myself, which I don’t deem unacceptable because it is not something required anyway. I might log the total time -0.2 for a flight spent in really bad weather, minima to minima, or also the same for a flight spent under the hood. I would also often log this for IFR flights at night which are spent mostly on instruments anyway. For other flights where maybe I only had to climb and descend through a layer, I would log perhaps 0.2 spent actual IF.

Maybe other people do it more precisely, but this satisfies what I want and it seems to keep me approximately true to the old 1:4 rule where the CAA deemed that 4 hours IFR would probably involve about 1 hour in IMC.

…however there were I believe a few things which previously required a certain amount of actual IF time …

That was required for “unfreezing” the ATPL under JAR-FCL. Since few people ever recorded flying time in IMC in Europe, almost everyone invented a figure to fill it in the form. Including myself On top of that comes the fact, that 99% of that IMC time is actually flown by the autopilot and not by myself, so why should I log it.

It’s something that (here in the UK) gets carried through from the military side.

Like “starbord” and “port” that you still hear over the radio at some British airfields. I would have to reply with “Say Again” if someone asked me to turn 20 degrees to starboard (even if the instruction was given as german Steuerbord). So is a sortie then single flight from A to B or the day spent flying?

Sortie would be a single flight. Not even necesarilly from A to B but in the PPL training scenario you could have Nav sorties and circuit sorties for example. You can more or less replace the word with “flight”. So as opposed to A to B flights or “days flying” an instructor might do 2 nav sorties and 3 circuit sorties in a day. I definitely see the pointlessness of the “sorties” in most situations, however I do use Port and Starboard myself sometimes. I haven’t heard the terms used in turn instructions etc, but more when referring to the aircraft itself which is where I think it can be useful. Air traffic have told me before “It looks like your Port nav light isn’t working” for example, where saying left or right could be confused as to who’s left or right it was; yours or the ATCO’s. I always assumed that that was the point of the terms, was that they were always used with reference to the craft so no confusion could arise.

With about 25 hours total very few hours compared to most here. Nearly all of them were Intermediate level aerobatic competition practice in various Pitts’s and an Extra 300L. So lots of inverted spins, outside loops, tailslides and snap rolls.

I also managed my first aeros in an open cockpit biplane (a Bucker Jungmann) and soloed a Tiger Moth. A very good year!

2013:
Hours flown: 131
IFR: 75
Night hours: 2
Landings: 103
New Ratings: IR/SEP, CPL (with ATPL credit)