Rob Mark and Jason Blair

Teterboro is one of the busiest business aviation airports in the United States, handling 178,000 takeoffs and landings annually, many on IFR flight plans. Most runways offer a straight-in approach, except Runway 1. KTEB’s proximity to nearby Newark Liberty means the best approach available to Runway 1 is the ILS Runway 6, circle to land […]

Localizer-only approaches have been around for decades, providing better-than-VOR lateral guidance while demanding no special cockpit avionics except the standard VOR-ILS indicator common to most airplanes. When it comes to accuracy, full-scale deflection of the course-deviation indicator from the center on a VOR signal represents 12 degrees off course, while a similar deflection on the […]

Most ILS approaches are constructed pretty much the same way. The environment in which a pilot might fly them can vary widely, however, and is important to consider. At an airport like New York’s La Guardia, which sees 375,000 annual takeoffs and landings, the ILS Runway 13 at the airport is used often. These traffic […]

The RNAV GPS Z approach to Runway 3 at Santa Monica is so new (April 2017), many pilots might not yet even be aware of its existence. (Two additional approaches to SMO were commissioned at the same time.) This new approach comes with a handful of restrictions, many of which are significant enough to demand […]

Visual approaches offer pilots an opportunity to remain within the IFR system but fly direct to the airport on their own. Once ATC issues a visual approach, however, responsibility for navigation and terrain clearance is transferred from the ground to the cockpit. Avionics manufacturers recently began adding visual-­approach capabilities to their navigation suites to create […]