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3 Answers

Picking VFR alternate

Asked by: 10267 views Instrument Rating

I learned that you can list an airport without instrument approaches as alternate, and you will need VFR from MEA to land.

If an airport has all instrument approaches marked with "A NA", can I still list it as alternate as long as its VFR from MEA?

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3 Answers



  1. Russ Roslewski on Feb 17, 2017

    That’s a great question. I like questions like this because it shows that the asker is trying to correlate a few different rules together.

    The answer isn’t clearly spelled out anywhere official that I could find. And it seems logical that if you can designate a airport with NO approaches as an alternate if the weather is good enough, you should be able to designate any airport as an alternate, even if its approaches have “A NA.”

    So we can only make some inferences.

    According to the TPP legend, “A NA” doesn’t actually mean “Alternate Not Authorized”. It means “Alternate Minimums are Not Authorized due to unmonitored facility or absence of weather reporting service”.

    Further, the A NA is assigned to a specific approach procedure, not the airport. You can find many examples where one procedure at an airport is A NA, while others don’t have that indication. Because while sometimes it’s a limitation of the airport (such as no weather reporting), other times it’s a limitation of the procedure itself (such as the final approach NAVAID is not monitored so nobody knows if it goes off the air).

    Since alternate minimums are determined by each individual approach (after all, in flight planning an alternate you pick which approach you are likely to need and use the alternate minimums for that one), having A NA on one approach does not restrict you from planning for another one if it doesn’t have A NA on it.

    If you’re planning to descend and land under VFR, you will not be using an approach.

    Therefore I think the only reasonable answer is that yes, you can plan to use an airport as an alternate if the weather is above VFR from the MEA, even if all of its approaches are A NA.

    I suppose I could have just said “yes” but where’s the fun in that? This was a good little thought exercise.

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  2. John D Collins on Feb 17, 2017

    I asked the FAA General Counsel a similar question, but the answer does not cover your case.

    My question revolved around filing IFR to a VFR only airport is permitted as long as their is a suitable alternate available. So I asked if it was permitted to file to an airport which had approaches, but my aircraft was not equipped to fly any of them (example I don’t have a GPS but the airport only has RNAV(GPS) approaches) assuming the airport was VFR and an suitable alternate that my aircraft could fly was filed. The answer was no.

    I am assuming the answer to the question you posed would most likely be no as well. The only way to get a good answer is to pose the question to the FAA General Counsel and request an opinion.

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  3. Mark Kolber on Feb 17, 2017

    John, your description of the answer to your question sounds like a very good reason to NOT ask the Chief Counsel the OP’s question.

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