IFR Magazine

Controllers have some tools right at their scopes that most pilots dont know about. By typing one of the following commands and clicking on an aircrafts target, the scope will highlight the nearest airport to the aircraft within a certain criteria, and give me a range and bearing to it:

The vast majority of my flying has been east of the Mississippi. However, the end of last year found me traversing the other coast from Mexico to the Canadian border during a two-day evaluation of a VLJ pilot based outside San Francisco. Our second leg of the trip had us in Santa Monica, ready to depart for San Diego, when ATC pitched us a nasty curve.My clients call to Clearance Delivery was answered with the query, Do you have the Santa Monica November routes onboard? My client looked at me with a puzzled glance. After my own initial confusion (The what?), followed by a smart-aleck impulse (Well if we do, whats it worth to you if we let them go?) I just shook my head to indicate I didnt know what the controller was talking about either.You could hear the exasperation in the controllers voice as she realized we were going to have to do this the hard way, and proceeded to read us one of the most complex clearances Ive received in quite some time. Once my client had read back the clearance, I asked the controller what that was about November routes. Theyre canned routes, sometimes you have them in the beginning of your book, she enigmatically responded.

Taking a look at the TEC section of the A/FD, we can see that Santa Monica November Routes 22 through 27 all serve the same destination airports from KSMO. So which one does a pilot pick or expect? That will depend on two factors: What broad class of aircraft the pilot is flying and what the wind patterns in the area are.

Mnemonics like these are just a form of checklist or, sometimes, short-step do list. The preflight crutch below might be what you recite to yourself just before you grab your bags and walk out to the airplane:

Id heard Stevie Ray recite The heat, the light, the auto-ignite during the last two takeoff rolls in the Citation before finally asking him what he was mumbling. Steve was known for cutting sarcasm and a lightning-fast wit; I hesitated to inquire but sensed a piloting technique was in there somewhere. Steve was surprisingly honest: I dont want to miss the pitot heat, the strobes, or the ignition switches when we get our clearance to roll, thats all. But Steve, I asked, we did the checklist and besides, there are no igniters on this bird, right? Maybe not, but our Gulfstream has em and Im not changing my habits. Stunned, all I could do was thoughtfully nod.Back then I would have dismissed Steves practice as feeble, but experience has brought an understanding that we pilots are the weakest link on the airplane-it only takes one bad day to prove it. Good day or bad, there are a number of steps that must be accomplished and it may come down to ritual or habit to see that the job gets done.

One of the things I enjoy about doing instrument instruction in the radar shadow of mountains is that students have to fly the occasional procedure turn. Radar vectors make this skill practically arcane for pilots over much of the U.S., so to actually see it needed in practice is eye-opening.But its not just over the bumpy land where you might need or want a PT, and thats what makes the ILS or LOC Rwy 18 at La Crosse, Wisc., interesting. An IFR reader sent a query our way as to how someone arriving from the south would get turned around on this approach without vectors. There is no PT charted.

Any talk of checklist types isnt complete without the concept of checklist boldface. So named due to its all-caps and emboldened print, these memory items ensure an initial response to an emergency when a written checklist wont be referenced until after the initial bold items are accomplished and the situation is stabilized. For example, only the first four items on this Quick Ref are memory.

Consider the scenario of a pilot departing into a 4000-foot overcast (above the MEA) in a non-FIKI aircraft after a weather briefing that contained no PIREPs for icing but with conditions potentially conducive to it. After takeoff and a hand-off to Departure but prior to entering the cold goo, does the pilot have a responsibility to query the controller for reports of icing? If he doesnt ask and then starts flying a popsicle, was he careless for not asking? What if there were reports just on the frequency that he might-or might not-have heard?

Its particularly a pilots nightmare: Youre sitting across the table from an FAA investigator trying to explain how your actions seemed reasonable at the time. Somehow you didnt know about the thunderstorm/icing/closed runway/TFR that the investigator has neatly printed out and was presumably public knowledge at least five minutes before you took off.The problem is really FAR 91.103. It requires that each pilot in command shall before beginning a flight, become familiar with all available information concerning that flight. Thats a tall order. The next two subsections specify the minimum information that must be obtained. For every flight, this includes takeoff and landing distances. For IFR flights and those VFR flights not in the vicinity of an airport, the reg adds weather reports and forecasts, fuel requirements, alternates and known traffic delays.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association honored controllers who helped bring broken aircraft and struggling pilots home. Winners of this years Archie awards included a team of South Florida air traffic controllers who helped a non-pilot land a King Air after the pilot died and a Kansas City controller who helped a Frontier Airlines crew return to the airport safely after a bird strike. The live ATC tapes are available at www.natca.org/mediacenter/Archie2010_Audio.msp.