Is the pilot legal, and is the airplane
Recent experience, recordkeeping and proficiency for the pilot; inspections, logbook entries, preventive maintenance and inoperative equipment for the airplane.
15 min read · Commercial operations
After this lesson you can
- State the recent flight experience a commercial pilot needs to carry passengers by day and by night, and where it is recorded.
- Tell proficiency apart from currency, and say why the commercial standard treats the difference as a risk.
- List the inspections and records that make an airplane airworthy for hire, and find each one in the logbooks.
- Name what a pilot may maintain under part 43 appendix A, and how the entry is written.
- Decide what to do with inoperative equipment before a flight, and why a deferral never applies in the air.
The commercial certificate does not change the two questions every flight starts with: is the pilot legal, and is the airplane. What changes is who is asking. A passenger who pays for the seat, a customer who owns the airplane, or an operator who hired you will assume both answers are yes, and none of them will check.
This lesson therefore reads the regulations the way an examiner does: as a set of records. Recent experience lives in your logbook; airworthiness lives in the airplane's. If it is not written down, it did not happen, and that sentence is the whole of recordkeeping.
The rest of this lesson
- 1.Recent flight experience: what 61.57 asks of you
- 2.Proficiency versus currency: the risk the ACS names
- 3.What makes the airplane airworthy for hire
- 4.Preventive maintenance: what you may do, and how you write it
- 5.Inoperative equipment: the decision before the flight
- 6.The ramp is part of the operation: security
These 6 sections, their figures, the checks along the way and the end-of-lesson quiz come with the CPL track. Paid once, yours for good.
Key terms
Try to recall each definition before turning the card.