Required VFR Day Equipment In 4 Easy Groups
Remembering the minimum day VFR airplane equipment that 91.205(b) requires can be tough. It’s fifteen items, and that’s a lot of little parts to piece together into a group. There are several tools we can use to help recall longer lists of items for a single purpose. One is a mnemonic device: a word or phrase from which the letters represent the items of the list we are trying to recall. The mnemonic is meant to provide an easier road to recall by prompting the larger set of information with a single word or short phrase.
One of my good law school friends was a prolific mnemonic user. He would even use super long mnemonics for fairly complex legal doctrine elements. It worked for him. But it wasn’t how I preferred to work—especially for lists of more than about five items. The more items I need to remember, the less a mnemonic makes sense; it tends to become just another layer of things to remember that aren’t actually logically related to the items or their function.
For 91.205(b), it is common to use the mnemonic “A TOMATO FLAMES.” That mnemonic hasn’t really worked for me for several reasons. First, it is long. That can make it harder to remember what those letters were supposed to stand for in the first place. It also has several repeat letters (3 As, 2 Ts, and 2 Os), and that can make it even harder to remember what they were supposed to stand for. Second, A TOMATO FLAMES does not arrange those items in any logical order—so when we are trying to reason through the items it is supposed to represent, the mnemonic may provide little or no value. Finally, it is actually incomplete—it represents only 13 of the 15 items that 91.205 requires.
There is a different way. First, consider the regulation itself: 91.205(b). The 15 VFR day equipment items it lists are indeed logical. And they fall into four logical categories: 3 are flight instruments; 5 are engine instruments; 4 are items related to the aircraft’s other systems; and 3 are related to the aircraft occupants’ personal safety. So I recommend breaking them down into those four categories (3/5/4/3) to help provide easier chunks of information to recall, plus a logical way to correlate them to the purpose (safe day flight). Correlating the list items from the regulation to the real world aids memory and makes it easier to apply them.
Here is how I break them down (3/5/4/3):
3 Flight Instruments
Airspeed Indicator
Altimeter
Magnetic direction indicator (compass)
5 Engine Instruments
Tachometer for each engine
Oil Pressure gauge for each engine
Temperature gauge for each liquid-cooled engine
Oil Temperature gauge for each engine
Manifold Pressure gauge for each altitude engine
4 Aircraft Systems Items
Fuel gauge indicating quantity of fuel in each tank
Landing gear position indicator (if retractable)
Anticollision lighting system (if certified after 3/11/1996)
ELT
3 Personal Safety Items
Flotation for each occupant ( if for hire over water beyond power-off glide range)
Safety belt with metal-to-metal latch for each occupant 2yrs or older
Shoulder harnesses (front seat) (if aircraft manufactured after 7/18/1978)
For a quick PDF summary of these items grouped in this 3/5/4/3 manner, see our One Sheet on equipment requirements here. You may find this 3/5/4/3 method more effective than A TOMATO FLAMES. Or you might be like my good friend. Do what works for you.
-APA
