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Stick and Cursor Flying
January 19, 2010
by Robert Goyer
I was sitting in my PlaneSmart Cirrus, engine idling, strobe light flashing, on the ramp at Oklahoma City’s Wiley Post Airport, and I was puzzled. I was staring down at my chicken scratch clearance as though it were written in some ancient lost language and wondering just what I was going to do with such a thing.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t copied my clearance accurately. My version had, moments earlier, earned the “readback correct” seal of approval. And it wasn’t that I didn’t understand the clearance. It made perfect sense. What I was trying to figure out was how to translate that clearance into something that my flight management system could deal with. Stupid computers.
“November 224TX, are you ready to taxi?” the ground controller (who was also the tower controller that day) interrupted my pondering.
“Uh, negative, 4TX needs a couple more minutes here,” I replied, thinking, “a couple more minutes to figure how the hell to enter this in my flight plan.”
The clearance was to, after I'd taken off, to follow radar vectors to intercept the 166-degree radial off of IRW, the favorite local VOR. If you’d have plopped me down in the left seat of the completely analog Piper Warrior in which I’d learned to fly, it would have been a piece of cake. Tune the nav radio, dial in the radial on the OBS, take the vector and then just intercept the course as it starts to come in. It’s straight out of VOR 101.
But there were two problems. Me and the Cirrus. Mostly me, I admit.
In all fairness, the Cirrus that I fly is a modern wonder. Outfitted with an amazing Avidyne Entegra flat-panel system with the brains of the nav part powered by dual Garmin GNS430W navigators, it can deal with about anything you can throw at it. But it makes no concession to the elegance of past inventions, which is to say, there’s no analog VOR CDI; it’s all on the HSI part of the Entegra PFD, a “pointer” you overlay on the display by pushing a series of buttons on the PFD. There not even a course knob to twist; you do it by entering the radial as a value in a pop-up screen in the 430.
The problem was intercepting that radial. After that, it was totally straight forward. It was, if I remember correctly, direct to a VOR a little further south and then just “direct to’s” and Victor Airways the rest of the way home.
And there was nothing particularly difficult about that radial, just that, like back course approaches and holds on an airway, it happens so rarely, every couple of years or so, that I don’t get any practice doing it. I guess that’s good justification for my flight instructor making me to do procedures I complain about “never” doing in real life. I should say, “hardly ever” do. So bring on those localizer back courses and DME arcs.
The other problem is, the old gauges were just better at doing this kind of navigating. Tune, twist, and fly and you’re good to go. There’s a lot to be said for that.
In the end I did get that magenta line on the nav screen, though I never did figure out exactly how to incorporate that “radial” leg into the flight plan, though I’m pretty sure I’ll get some advice in this forum. (I'm thinking you just need to suspend auto sequencing navigation while flying it.) Which is what I did. I just flew the leg until it was time to do something else, and then I did that. This is, I seem to remember, is pretty the way that navigation used to get done, none of this putting in all 27 legs of a long flight plan before you even taxi. It was a different way of looking at the process of planning and flying a cross country flight, and there was something simple and right about it.
In the end, I was able to fly the clearance just fine, despite my momentary floundering. But it got me thinking that I really need to tune VORs on a more regular basis, if just for the practice.
And the whole experience made me a bit nostalgic, heaven help me, for the lovely art of tuning and twisting, which I practiced for too short a time before jumping into the computerized cockpit age. The dance of analog radios and indicators is in its way a thing of beauty and it takes a skilled operator to make a complicated flight plan play out.
Just don’t get me started on all the things I don’t miss about analog radio navigation. That would be a much longer and much more passionate story.
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Hi Robert, I too sometimes encounter your situation. Long after the airline world had embraced FMS and EFIS, I was flying 737-200's with dual vor's and an ADF. We flew into every airport of size east of the Mississippi and lived on "tune and rotate" followed later by "how about a heading for direct". I too love the flat screens and ease of operation we now have, but like you, flying the VOR's, while inefficient, definitely did not cause mental strain. My rv-8 has four GPS's and the GIII I fly has three but they both require schooling and time to load.
Tom Wright
Portland, Maine
Robert,
I had a similar moment a few months back. Flying a G1000 equipped 182T I was cleared direct to the Westminster (EMI) VOR (easy), then via the EMI 321 radial to intercept the Hagerstown (HGR) 089 then direct to destination KHGR. I had to wrap my head around that just a bit!
After a few moments, I figured that the best way was to fly with VOR #1 selected as the NAV source to PFD (OBS set to 321) and centered the needle while watching the VOR #2 bearing pointer as it counted down to 089. Actually the A/P did the interception/tracking but you get the picture. A bit of context, this was a clearance to circumnavigate the Camp David restricted area when POTUS is not there.
Marty Sacks
Baltimore, MD
Hey – it sounds like when I switched from my very adequate cell phone to my iPhone. Confused at first, but loving it now. However, you are right; one must make a few calls now and then, instead of texting all the time, just to remember how we use to communicate.
Cheers, Ed
A number of years ago I was talking to an airline pilot who recently transitioned from a steam gauge DC-9 to a glass 737. He said that although he was proficient and comfortable in the glass cockpit, he preferred the analog and missed it dearly. I also remember an article in Flying magazine written by a captain performing the final flight in his airlines DC-9. It was a great article describing the emotional bond between pilots and their aircraft. This gentleman had thousands of hours in the type and the reader could clearly feel his sadness as he walked away.
There is just something about an analog cockpit that lends itself to the warm fuzzy feeling of days gone by, and although the new glass from Garmin, Avidyne, Aspen and others are excellent products, they don’t evoke the same feelings as the “old school” panels do. Tom Wright is correct, although the analog system was inefficient compared to the current crop of FMS based navigators, it wasn’t nearly as prone to make you wonder “How in the world do I do that?”
Philip Wilson
-Aerorush.com
Robert,
Following the radial on either the VOR or GPS in OBS mode is a practical way to go, but to answer your question, it is also possible to get the exact clearance into the 430W/Entegra in the Cirrus without too much fuss.
Since "RV to join the IRW-166 radial, to the the ADM-321 radial, ADM" is a typical southbound departure from the OKC area and setting up well can reduce inflight workload, you may want to create a user-wpt at the IRW-166/ADM-321 intersection (on user wpt page; takes 30-sec or less on batt2 prior to engine start in a Cirrus). Once you have the wpt, the flight plan is PWA, IRW, IRW16 (user wpt), ADM... Scroll down to IRW16, press menu, and select "Activate Leg" for guidance to join the IRW-166 radial rather than direct IRW.
The magenta line and HSI will show how well the vectors are working to join the IRW-166 radial. Once cleared to join, you can select HDG with GPSS armed on the AP. Your GPS+AP will auto-sequence through the whole flight-plan following the depiction on the Entegra and 430W without further intervention.
--
Craig (CFII/MEI at PWA)
http://AwlBiz.com/fly