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Quiz Goof The November quiz was hands down the best summary of SIDSs and ODPs I have ever read. Curious about your answer to Question 8, “A charted SID procedure . . .” Your explanations are about the differences between SIDs and ODPs but they have nothing to do with the answer choices? Did I […]

Save Those Recordings I watched a YouTube vid the other day where an obviously concerned CFI, after thanking the controller for all their support and all they do, still asked that the controller “Please mark the tapes.” The obviously task saturated and presumably annoyed controller replied with words something like, “Sir, this is the 21st […]

Special VFR Great September 2023 article on Special VFR (SVFR) by Elim Hawkins. I can see how this might become a well-worn tool for VFR-only pilots and a rusty unused one for IFR pilots. As an instrument pilot in an instrument plane who’s already operating on an IFR flight plan, I would never choose the […]

Mood Music for Sim Challenge I always enjoy your Sim Challenges and often punish my students by loading them up in our sim. I particularly like the trip around Hawaii in August’s “Island Hoping [SIC].” In fact, to set the mood for this challenge with my students, I had some Hawaiian music playing in the […]

I always enjoy the magazine. Thank you to all who provide and produce the content. In Tarrance Kramer’s “Towerless Tribulations” article in April, he discussed the benefit of pilots cancelling IFR before landing at a non-towered airport. I agree with this sentiment; however it is worth noting that there are commercial operators whose Operations Manuals […]

Autopilot Coupling NA? See the KSTS ILS Runway 32 approach. It states that autopilot coupled approaches are NA below 1038 feet. DA is 380 feet. Why the prohibition on autopilot use? Tim Massey Kentfield, California The navigation information you see (CDI/VDI) is heavily damped. The raw signal sometimes bounces all over the place—less so with […]

GNS Can Hold I’ve certainly enjoyed your magazine for some time now, but with the March article, “Random Holds” by Mark Kolber, I was a little surprised he did not mention the use of the OBS function on the GNS 4xx and 5xx Garmin navigators with regards to creating a random hold. I’m sure many […]

Annoying Marketing Long-time IFR Magazine subscriber and fan here. I have a suggestion, not related to your content (which I love) but to your advertising practices. Two or three times a week I get an e-mail ad asking me to subscribe to IFR Magazine. I cannot block the address it comes from (no-reply@ifr-magazine.com) because there […]

As always, January’s “Incommunicado” is an excellent article from Tarrance Kramer. The article about the fun-and-games of losing communication between pilot and ATC, from the controller’s point of view, prompted some thoughtful discussion around here, confirming once again we periodically need to review the pilot’s rules for NORDO (none of us could recite, from memory, […]

Alternate Mins NA? As the FAA is transitioning the National Airspace System (NAS) to Performance Based Navigation (PBN), more and more we see VORs becoming unmonitored or unserviceable. When a VOR is NOTAMed “unmonitored,” my understanding is that if you can identify it in the aircraft (Morse code) and have a good signal, you can […]