Rob Mark and Jason Blair

Milwaukee ILS/Loc Rwy 1L is a complicated simple procedure. Scroll over the interactive image below for details.

Mention Morristown to an active pilot, and they’ll probably be quick to pinpoint it as a busy New Jersey airport 20 or so miles west of downtown Manhattan. This month’s Chart Wise, however, focuses on another Morristown, population 29,000, this one in Tennessee, a half-hour northeast of Knoxville. For readers wondering what kind of educational […]

Cleveland Burke Lakefront Airport (BKL) now holds the title of “that fantastic little airport by the lake,” a slogan once reserved for the now-defunct Chicago Meigs Field (CGX). BKL gets lots of use by corporate and private aircraft by offering easy access to downtown Cleveland, the football stadium, the aquarium and, of course, the Rock […]

Like the late stand-up comic Rodney Dangerfield who never seemed to get enough respect, the people at Gary Airport (GYY) feel as if they’ve been missing the love for many years. Sitting 20 miles south of Chicago along the shore of Lake Michigan, Gary Airport has certainly seen its share of failed airline startups including […]

Butte, Montana, and its Bert Mooney Airport (BTM) are nestled snuggly between the Yellowstone and Glacier national parks in the southwestern portion of the state, where copper mining was once the primary economic driver. The Butte VOR-A approach to Mooney Airport seems pretty straightforward, but remember, of course, that any approach without a runway number […]

In an era of WAAS GPS navigation systems on board even the smallest aircraft, flying a localizer back-course approach could seem rather archaic. Indeed, for years many pilots viewed a LOC BC approach as more of an afterthought at airports, simply because the procedure was built off the back side of a full ILS system […]

Sitting just a few miles north of the Tennessee-Georgia state line, Chattanooga’s Lovell Field (CHA) saw nearly 60,000 takeoffs and landings last year, with the Tracon workload hovering near 90,000 aircraft, nearly 50,000 of which operated into the airport on an IFR flight plan. Chattanooga’s airport elevation is less than 1,000 feet, but a glance […]

Sitting just north of the Los Angeles Class B airspace, Van Nuys Airport, which is Class D, is one of the busiest in the United States, with a single set of parallel runways: the 8,001-by-150-foot Runway 1/16 Right, and adjacent Runway 1/16 Left, at 4,013 by 75 feet. Last year, VNY logged just shy of […]

For pilots expecting never again to face a non-precision approach tied to a land-based navaid, we can confirm that rumors of the demise of the VOR have been greatly exaggerated. In 2016, the FAA began eliminating many of the GPS overlay approaches tied to older VOR procedures ahead of plans to also eliminate a significant […]

Although the Morristown Six could easily be confused with a ’60s rock-and-roll band, the name actually applies to a standard instrument departure procedure, also known as a SID. SIDs look and feel different from traditional approach procedures, often including far more information arranged in a complex layout some pilots might find confusing. Air traffic control […]