Charts & Plates

You planned this getaway weekend to Wise County, Virginia months ago. A cabin is ready. A rental car awaits you when you land at Lonesome Pine airport (KLNP). It’s good to be instrument rated. The reported ceilings are comfortably high at 1500 AGL. It’s nice to have the protection of an instrument approach when going […]

Oxygen If You’re Tired? I enjoyed Victor Vogel’s “Managing Fatigue” in your April issue. I have asked many people and read many articles. No one has ever said, “Why yes, supplemental oxygen will help keep you wide awake.” This has included AME’s, IFR instructors, et. al. Is there an FAA rule against saying that? Or […]

We usually make these so you can fly them with or without a GPS in your sim, but that’s getting more difficult every day. It’s a GPS world out there. Do you really not have some kind of GPS on your sim? Time to ditch that Windows Vista box and get with the times, my […]

Back in the old days of aviation weather, surface and upper-air charts were complicated things left to the forecasters. As a pilot, you made a phone call and copied down takeoff and destination weather, the flight weather conditions, and any hazards along the way. Today’s pilots are more sophisticated, well versed in electronic devices, and […]

After a three-day trip to the Denver area mixing business and recreation, you’re heading eastbound for home with a stop in Medford, Oklahoma, to visit a friend. Medford Muni (Oscar-53) doesn’t seem to have much to it, though, so you review the logistics to confirm it’ll work for an overnight. One runway at 3007 feet? […]

In this reintroduction of a past series of articles, we’ll fully dissect a particular chart or procedure. While many of the points we’ll make should be uncovered in a normal briefing, our analysis will extend far beyond. Our hope is that by exploring the edge cases of available procedures, you’ll better understand how to handle […]

Many consider the instrument rating as the most difficult aeronautical achievement. This is probably even more the case today than when I earned that coveted capability almost a half-century ago. While aircraft haven’t changed much, the avionics, regulations, and AIM have all undergone significant metamorphosis. Today’s GPS equipment and the procedural techniques required in Technically […]

Flight-planning your Washingtonstate mini-vacation taught you a lot about identifying obstacles on approach. Overall, IFR into Deer Park won’t be too onerous for terrain or procedures. But it does mean unseen obstructions—some close to the final approach path (see “Obstacle Hunt” in last month’s IFR). It took time to piece together the details using all […]

GPS in general aviation aircraft has become ubiquitous. So much so that the FAA’s move to a Performance Based Navigation (PBN) world based primarily on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is well underway. We are already seeing the cancellation of “redundant” and “underutilized” VOR (and NDB) approaches. For en-route navigation, we have the Minimum […]

When briefing an approach, we might not care what a given “obstacle” actually is. But they do come in all shapes and sizes; the chart symbols indicate as much. So it’s a good idea, especially in unfamiliar areas with lots of obstacles, to know what’s down there, be it metal, dirt, rocks or trees. The Aeronautical […]