Irv Lee is well-known thanks to his popular seminars and contributions to different flying magazines. He is an instructor at Popham and his experience shows in this DVD for rusty VFR pilots.
Rust Remover for Pilots is ideal for infrequent pilots emerging from winter hibernation. It contains lots of gentle reminders towards best practice and some great tips.
I liked his suggestion of marking out a 10nm-wide corridor along your expected track and then setting a GPS CDI scale to 10nm so that you can use it to see how far left or right of track you are. A neat way of making a GPS an aide to VFR flying.
Another tip that resonated with me was the simplest one on the DVD. Irv suggests that you take a couple of minutes when you get into the cockpit to sit and take in the controls and displays and make yourself at home. So much of flying is routine and checklists and rushing to get airborne (especially if you have an IFR slot or a schedule to meet), this moment can be very precious.
The DVD covers pre-flight planning, departures, basic maneuvres, overhead joins and landings.
The production values of the DVD is very high. It is well-made and nicely edited. I think it is better than the John and Martha King DVDs I used for my instrument rating and less, well, American, super pilot. In fact Irv’s reassuring instructor’s patter is well-suited for narration. There’s probably a job for him at Channel 4 somewhere.
Overall, for low-hours, VFR pilots or pilots emerging from a period of non-flying, this is a good way to get back in the saddle. It’s cheaper than an hour’s flight with an instructor and covers a lot of the same ground. Even for a relatively high-hours IR pilot, it had some useful content and would make good viewing on one of those days when your flight gets cancelled unexpectedly.
£24.99 plus £2.00 post and packaging from Irv Lee’s website.