Ask a Flight Instructor

Archive for March, 2008

Today I had the privilege of taking a control tower tour at Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport in Springfield, Ohio (KSGH). It wasn’t my first control tower tour but it was definitely my most pleasant. The staff that works at Springfield tower, well, simply amazing. I really can’t say enough good about them; professional, friendly and very very helpful.

If you have never had the opportunity to do so, taking a tour of a ATC tower is highly recommended. It is very educational to see what goes on on the other side of the radio and all that happens to make a control tower run. Besides learning a great deal, it is also nice to put faces with the voices you hear and interact with on a daily basis. I especially recommend this if you are working or thinking about working on your instrument rating. You learn a lot seeing the processes behind a flight control strip being generated, printed, the information on it and how it is handled in the system. You will benefit from learning about Radar and how emergency services are activated. You will also gain an appreciation for all that Air Traffic Control does to make each and every flight smooth and above all, safe.

The best way to schedule a tour is to call them and schedule one in advance. Obviously, some control towers will not be able to accommodate at certain times of the day due to air traffic volume but you’ll find that most of them are more than happy to meet you. Don’t be intimated just because they work for the FAA! If you want to call them, most of your FBOs will have the phone number for the local tower. You can also look it up in AC-U-KWIK

Thanks again to the guys at Springfield and like always…

Fly Safe.

photo credit: Micah Maziar

Did you know you can use Wunderground to find historic information for airports? This can be extremely handy when flight planning a month or two ahead of time and trying to find out if you will be able to meet your performance criteria such as takeoff and landing distance which is temperature dependent.

To try this out go to:

http://www.wunderground.com

On the search bar type in the name of your destination airport:

Once you do that you can scroll down the page till you see “Weather History for This Location” or you can scroll down further till you see “History and Almanac”. Select the day of your proposed flight from the dropdown box; for year, I would pick the most recent (2007). That will then open a new window.

You will then see the the data we are looking for: Mean temperature.

This is great! Now we can know with pretty good certainty what the temperature will be on the day we are proposed to fly. Now we can look up our performance numbers using our POH or AFM, our runway lengths and make sure everything checks out ok.

Fly Safe.

I can remember when as an new instructor my flight school purchased their very first Garmin 430. We were all very excited and as instructors we immediately realized that their were going to be lots of people asking us for checkouts in this airplane with this new Garmin 430. The only problem was, none of us knew how to use it. So what I did when I got home was go immediately to Garmin.com and download the training simulator. I then downloaded the user’s manual and set the two up on my screen side-by-side (tiled) and went through each page of the user’s manual while trying the function on the training simulator. Saved lots of time, money and received great training thereby putting me in a position to give great training as well. (I of course received a “formal” checkout from my chief instructor before giving any real checkouts).

Now that Garmin has the 430 and 530 WAAS approved, it was time to try this approach again. To start, I went to:

https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?pID=8052&tab=gns530

I looked on the right hand side of the screen and found the link for “Download Simulator.” Once you click that you will see a popup screen that will allow to select the simulator you want to try out. The Garming 400/500 WAAS trainer is almost 103 MB so if you are on dial-up this might take a while. Once you have it download you can install it by following the setup instructions. I would also recommend downloading the manual for the unit. You can download the manual for the Garmin 530 with WAAS here and the Garmin 430 with WAAS here. If you already familiar with the 430 and 530 but just want a quick rundown on the new features of the WAAS equipped GPS you can do so by downloading this manual from Garmin

Now that you have the manual and the training simulator launch both of them and organize your screen to look something like this:

To make this training complete you also should download an approach plate. If you are a member of AOPA you can download approach charts from their website. For my demonstration, I downloaded the RNAV (GPS) RWY 7 into Greene County Lewis A Jackson Regional Airport (I19).

Next time we’ll discuss some of the differences between a non-WAAS Garmin 530 and a WAAS equipped Garmin 530.

Fly Safe.

I just read on AOPA.org tonight that the FAA on Feb 28 released a rule requiring pilots to use the newer plastic certificates (versus the old paper ones).  So if you haven’t requested one, well, now would be a good time to do so.   Although, you might want to wait a couple weeks as the FAA is working hard to complete the orders for the “English Proficiency” endorsements that I discussed earlier this week.  Replacement certificates usually cost $2 but if you are removing your social security number from your license the cost is free.

Here are some links to learn more about this new rule:

• The Federal Register discussing the new requirement
• AOPA.org original article
• Request your new plastic certificate