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VFR

What’s your favourite airport approach?

Aileen's Cannes July 036-w480-h480

VFR approach into Cannes

I was part of a judging panel for PrivateFly’s favourite approaches poll. My three suggestions (which I have flown myself) were:

Cannes

When you fly the VFR approach, you fly right over the centre of the town, over a beautiful medieval walled village and then turn south and fly down to the actual runway with a view of the sea ahead. It’s utterly beautiful.

Amsterdam

The VFR approach to Amsterdam is insane. There’s a short-ish GA runway and you approach from the East at low altitude and only turn finals when you are over the midpoint of the runway. But the truly beautiful approach is the ILS for the GA runway that takes your right over the centre of the city. In good weather, the view over the canals is beautiful.

Belfast

Perhaps not as glamorous as Cannes or Amsterdam but my memories of flying into Belfast City at night are very strong. I popped through a cloud layer at about 4,000 feet and the city was lit clearly below me and, after a long flight, it felt very welcoming. I had to go to Belfast to get my Visa for my CPL training so it was a quick overnighter and a great example of how flexible you can be if you have an instrument rating and a well-equipped plane like the Cirrus at your disposal.

So, what are you favourite approaches? Comments below please. Also take a minute to vote at PrivateFly.com on the shortlist we chose.

Are you a pilot who cancels too many flights?

John Zimmerman has written an interesting post for Air Facts Journal in response to comments from their “Go or no go” series to ask the question: Do you cancel too many flights? To first put things in perspective: John says that the comments the series has received are revealing because a number of pilots appear to be uncomfortable flying in anything less than clear skies and unlimited visibility. In fact, he might even go so far as to say that the aviation community has beaten everyone over the head with the risk management stick so much that some pilots are afraid to fly in IFR. 

John then outlined what he thinks are the three major reasons for canceling flights:

  • We put too much stock in forecasts. John wrote that to delegate flight decision-making authority to an hours-old text forecast is “lazy, naive or both.” On the other hand, he also added that many pilots think that as long as the weather forecast is good, there won’t be any danger when flying. 
  • We’re afraid to “go take a look.” While John acknowledges that get-home-itis is a major cause of accidents for VFR pilots, he also adds that it can be safe for an IFR pilot – when it’s done properly. Pilots just need to have “ironclad rules” for when to quit and must always have an out. Specifically, John noted a late afternoon flight he did where the tightly packed thunderstorms on the ground-based radar actually turned out to be scattered enough in the air to allow for wide gaps between the cells and for an uneventful flight.
  • Instrument training doesn’t expose us to weather. John wrote that many pilots spend the majority of their instrument training practicing procedures and paperwork and never actually get much real in the air IFR flying to see real weather systems from the cockpit.

Of course, John did write that pilots should make decisions based on personal minimums as a legal trip may not be a safe trip but he also pointed out that pilots by their very nature are risk takers:

It’s simply what IFR flying is all about: accepting some level of calculated risk in exchange for great utility. If you’re not doing that, you’re not using the rating you worked so hard for. In fact, if you’re not doing that, you might not be getting out of bed in the morning.

In other words, you could easily find a reason to cancel every flight but then there would be no point to having spent so much money, time and effort to obtain a pilot license in the first place.

Top 10 weather rules to fly by

Richard Collins has written a great article for Air Facts Journal listing his top 10 weather rules for flying which were the following:

  1. Distrust any weather forecast calling for an improvement at a location covered in fog because you don’t want to be stuck in the air above a foggy airport without enough fuel. Moreover and if its overcast ABOVE the fog, you are going to run into even more problems.
  2. When the wind aloft forecast is substantially wrong, don’t trust any other forecast.
  3. Scattered clouds can end up causing the same effect as overcast approaches in IMC. Moreover, they could form into broken clouds or cause overcast conditions.
  4. Turbulence can tell you plenty about what is going on in the clouds – which can either be wind shear turbulence that can make flying a chore or convective turbulence that make it difficult to maintain altitude and air speed.
  5. There is no such thing as getting trapped by the weather as there are always signs that a system or something is forming.
  6. Cloud tops are always 1,000 feet greater than the ceiling for the aircraft you are flying in according to former Senator (and General) Barry Goldwater who was also a pilot – a point worth remembering.
  7. A windsock is the most reliable indicator of a gusty crosswind during a takeoff or landing.
  8. Early birds be warned: Substantial weather changes can happen shortly after sunrise – including the appearance of fog or frost on the aircraft.
  9. The onset of rain while flying VFR is bad news as it will cut visibility and lower clouds will tend to form after the rain starts. Rain can also make visibility from the aircraft much worst than the visibility being reported on the ground.
  10. If the wind shifts from northwest to north to northeast after the passage of a cold front, it means the front has stalled and has turned into a stationary front – meaning VFR flying may be off the table for awhile.

Richard went into considerable detail about each of these rules and he concluded by saying that a VFR pilot has the easiest time figuring out weather conditions as its always in plain view outside the windshield.

However, are there any weather rules for flying that Richard may have left out – especially any specific rules specific to UK or European weather conditions?

Pilot stalkers…

How do you know when someone wants to stalk a pilot?

… they request flight following.

Cross country flying tips and safety quiz

Scott Spangler, the blogger behind the Jetwhine blog, has mentioned a recent email from the AOPA Air Safety Institute that contained a link to its safety quiz on cross country flying. The quiz contained 10 questions about a 350 mile VFR trip from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, to Festus, Missouri and even comes with blow-up sectional chart images on which to search for the correct multiple-guess response.

However, Scott wrote that despite his confidence going into the test, his test results were “humbling” and he figures that the test questions were based on their research about what areas pilots “screw up the most.”

Meanwhile and before you take the quiz, you might want to check out a recent video put together by Jason Schappert for his MzeroA.com site about how to choose great cross country checkpoints. Jason recommends that you avoid using cell towers, private airports, small bodies of water and cities as checkpoints and opt for public airports, large roads, rivers and large landscape changes instead.

Jason has a number of other videos covering cross country flights here that would also be well worth reviewing to help you brush up on your cross country flying skills before taking the AOPA test or going on a cross country flight. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV7jcT3gK-M&w=480]

Three top PC flight planning tools

I have been using Jeppesen FliteStar for about ten years for my VFR and, later, IFR flight planning. It takes a bit of learning but it is a powerful tool for flight planning and viewing instrument approach plates.

However, there are two big problems with it. First, it is hellaciously expensive. For VFR and IFR planning with digital IFR and VFR plates for Europe, it was costing me around €1,800 a year. Even in the context of an expensive hobby, that’s a lot of money. Bill Gates thinks that’s a lot of money.

Second, their billing is so obscure and their accounts department so incredibly unhelpful that it is impossible to change plans or figure out what, exactly, you are paying for. Or at least, that was my experience. For example, when I changed plans last year (it took three months to do this), they kept sending me an invoice even though they actually owed me money.

As a side issue, I was using Homebriefing.com to actually file my flight plans. I can’t get my head around AFPEx (even though I work with computers all day). Also, it doesn’t work on my iPhone which makes it useless if I’m abroad. Homebriefing is great and they have helpful people at the end of the phone to sort out problems but for an infrequent user, it feels like you have to hand over money every time you log on. Either my annual subscription has expired or I have run out of coupons for flight plans. Arghh.

So what am I using now? I looked at a few things but here is my plan from now on:

VFR Flight Planning

I’m going to use SkyDemon. It’s easier to use than Jeppesen, integrates NOTAMs and weather to produce a lovely trip kit and really attractive maps that filter out information you don’t need (e.g. airspace above your planned cruising altitude). It includes charts for most of Europe and they look very clean and easy to use.

Map view from SkyDemon

It feels like a simple, quick, efficient way to pull together everything you need for a VFR flight without wasting time or hopping between programs. It costs £119. You can (optionally) renew your subscription to charts etc. for £59 a year after the first year.

IFR Flight Planning

I’m going to check out RocketRoute. It combines IFR route planning with plates and online filing for flight plans. It is like a combination of the functional bits of Flitestar, Jeppview and Homebriefing.

Jeppesen’s tool for automatically planning an IFR airways trip never really worked very well and I often ended up refining them manually. This is why I really like RocketRoute’s AutoRouter. It produces valid routes between airfields quickly and then automatically validates them with Eurocontrol (which Jeppesen did not do). I think I’ll need to buy Jeppesen paper airways charts  in case it generates routes that don’t work for my circumstances but that’s not a big expense – £10 a year or something. Once you have set up your aircraft, you can reuse them in flight plans cutting down on the amount of time it takes to file plans in future.

RocketRoute

RocketRoute supplies two types of plates: Pooleys iPlates which are the familiar VFR plates in electronic form. It also grabs the latest IFR plates from the various European AIPs. This is less satisfactory than using Jeppesen plates because they do not share a standard format from one country to the next. However, they are free, in English and usable. Since the planes I fly have glass cockpits with Jepp plates onboard, these printed plates are belt-and-braces (and a legal requirement).

Once you have filed your plan, you can download or fax a briefing pack with a plog, ICAO flight plan, METAR/TAFs, NOTAMs and plates. Print it out and away you go. It really couldn’t be much easier. I can also access it via my iPhone to send delay notices and change flight plan details overseas.

It costs €144 a year for up to 50 filed flight plans plus €35 for online access to Pooleys VFR plates. Trip support (e.g. telephone filing of flight plans, slot booking etc. costs €5-€35 depending on what you ask them to do. It would be useful to have this to fall back like a personal flight department.

Easier, faster, cheaper

So, I’ve ditched Jeppesen, saving €1800 a year and picked up a VFR and an IFR flight planning system that costs me about €300-ish this year and a bit less next year. That’s a big saving and I think the end result is, actually, a better, more flexible system.