Charts & Plates

The rumble of tire rubber on asphalt suddenly ceases. Runway 9 falls away as you climb straight ahead, assigned runway heading up to 3000 feet. Your requested cruising altitude is 9000. “Contact Departure,” Tower says. Your next fix—FFFIX—is a right turn to the southeast. But in that direction lies a large air-carrier airport. Airliner departures […]

Departures into low clouds might not be your thing, and that’s fine. Staying on the ground is the ultimate risk mitigation for absolutely any concern. But departing in IMC is common practice and can mean anything below three statute miles of visibility and/or ceilings below 1000 feet. That’s a wide weather window when deciding if […]

Before EFBs and apps displaying electronic terminal and en-route charts, we went through a monthly update ritual with paper charts. Every 28 days Jeppesen chart subscribers got new and updated paper sheets. The new sheets had to be placed into the famous Jeppesen seven-ring binders. Then obsolete charts were discarded. Depending on the subscription coverage, […]

Your trip to Florida wasn’t what you envisioned when launching from Texas that morning in clear skies. But what matters is you made it in safely despite things going wrong in the last 50 miles. Chalk it up to 1) a robust recurrent training regimen and 2) top-notch preflight planning, which had you collecting items […]

During the summer, many pilots in the Upper Midwest plan half-day flights for vacation, and it’s inevitable that we have to contend with theGreat Lakes. Whether we stop short, go around, or go across, there’s always added bulk to the flight planning. Want to overfly Lake Superior for both the view and the shortcut? There’s […]

It’s not fun trying to make a left turn out of my neighborhood. It exits onto a busy, six-lane road. There’s no traffic light, just a gap in the median. Cutting across steady traffic demands patience, timing, and good judgment. Mistakes can be costly. The asphalt is littered with shrapnel from cars whose owners tried […]

One friend of mine is a former Navy pilot who flew S-3 Vikings off carriers and commanded P-3 Orions. Despite such experience his transition to civilian light GA was full of new experiences—like mixture controls. He texted me one day thrilled over a bit of old school buried in the glass-panel display options. “This thing […]

It’s a cloudy, breezy day, and you’re flying the family from northern Iowa to Chanute in southeastern Kansas. Other than a headwind and a Convective SIGMET covering part of the way, there’s no significant weather occurring, and the forecast is steady. So the concern at hand is the approach: Which one? There are two choices, […]

When I first saw the approach chart for the ILS Y or LOC Y RWY 3 at Raleigh Executive Jetport at Sanford-Lee County, South Carolina (KTTA), I thought I was seeing something unusual. I was. It’s an ILS approach with a Terminal Arrival Area (TAA). Yes, these are possible and we’re starting to see more, […]

Thanks to some typical spring weather in the air, it’s cloudy, hazy, and breezy at Chadron Muni, Nebraska. But you’re well briefed on what to expect while flying the RNAV (GPS) RWY 21 approach procedure. Given the conditions and this being a new destination for you, it turned out to be a smart move to […]