Membership: The best card for pilots

What if every time you fueled the aircraft you rent for training you could get some of that cost back in your wallet? Or if each time you take a lesson and make a payment you could get cash back? With AOPA’s new World Mastercard you can. AOPA has negotiated this and other great deals with Commerce Bank. In addition to 2-percent fuel savings, card members also get 4 percent cash back on any purchase through AOPA—such as branded apparel, coffee mugs, and more. Card users also get 3 percent back on purchases from select AOPA partners in a wide variety of aviation categories. Oh, and one more thing: You’ll receive 1 percent cash back on any purchase. These reasons are why AOPA Senior Vice President of Marketing Jiri Marousek calls the AOPA World Mastercard “the best card for pilots.”

In addition to great cash-back incentives, your use of the AOPA World Mastercard supports the association’s efforts to protect general aviation. Membership dues can’t cover all the initiatives AOPA undertakes to protect and defend general aviation—fighting user fees, ATC privatization, and egregious FBO pricing, and advocating for improvements such as BasicMed—so funds back into the association from your use of the AOPA World Mastercard help keep GA strong and members like you flying.

Next time you top off the fuel tank or pay for a lesson, think about the savings and the benefits you could be receiving from the AOPA World Mastercard. It’s our members who keep AOPA hard at work, and it’s why we’re recommending the “best card for pilots.”

Web: www.aopa.org/creditcard

PILOT SPEAK

Dead stick

What do rotting pieces of wood have to do with flying? Nothing, really. Dead stick is an action, the art of flying an injured airplane to the ground and hopefully arriving there undamaged. Usually when the term is used the assumption is that the engine quit for any number of reasons. Never a group for proper grammar, usually you’ll hear a pilot say something along the line of, “He dead sticked it.”

Barber pole

Such a simple name for an oh-so-complex concept. Transonic shock is a potentially destabilizing wave that forms on aircraft surfaces as the aircraft reaches somewhere between about 0.8 Mach and supersonic. To avoid the instability, manufacturers create a maximum mach number, which varies with altitude. Because it constantly changes, a second needle is used on the airspeed indicator to display the current value. That red-and-white-striped pointer looks like a barber pole.