Aviation Mentor

New Year, New Photos

2012-01-22T21:07:00.000-08:00

Very hectic teaching schedule the last six weeks due to warm and dry conditions, but the weather has finally become winter-like. More posts in the hopper, but until then ... some photos.

Descent to Clear Lake

Coastal Range

Bay Area Morning

Fog Rolls in at Mavericks

Valley Light

Mission Peak

Altamont Windmills

Near Panoche

Also Near Panoche

Winter Arrived a few days ago ...

Lake Merced

San Francisco

San Joaquin Sunrise

Scaggs Island Inbound

Valley Fog Advecting Westward

Near Tracy

Windmills and Fog

Zeppelin Sunset

3DBB

2012-01-16T22:28:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me a few months ago that the iPad has become my very own version of the 3DBB. Some explanation may be in order. When I ask people about my age if they remember a cartoon called Tennessee Tuxedo many do not. Perhaps Total Television, the production company that produced it, only had regional arrangements with CBS. Maybe it only aired in certain areas of the country. Or maybe as a kid I just watched too much TV. In any event, the Tennessee Tuxedo plots always seemed to follow a similar pattern. Tennessee (a penguin voiced by Don Adams) and his walrus pal Chumley had some sort of task to accomplish. This usually involved escaping from the zoo and tackling some technical problem that required them to learn something about science or history. When they got stumped, they'd enlist the help of their friend Phineas J. Whoopee - the man with all the answers. While educating this unlikely pair of escapees, Mr. Whoopee would invariably employ a device called the three-dimensional blackboard, or 3DBB for short.

To illustrate why the iPad is like the 3DBB, consider just a few of the apps I've run across that you can use to hone your aviation skills.

Sporty's G1000 Checkout

If you've been avoiding transitioning to the G1000, Sporty's new app could be a big help. The app consists of a series of instructional videos that introduce the G1000 components and then delves into the features in a systematic and logical way. From synthetic vision to autopilot usage, this app pretty much has you covered. There are even G1000 manuals and quizzes you can take to test how much you've retained. Pony up $80, go through this series before you get in a G1000 Cessna, and you might just save yourself a big chunk of change.

Garmin GTN Trainer

Garmin's 430/530 series of GPS receivers was hugely successful, but that success certainly was not due to a sterling user interface. What helped aircraft owners and pilots accept the Garmins was the availability of a free PC trainer they could use to master the perverse cursor-mode-big-nob-little-nob-enter dance for free. Garmin has done the smart thing and produced a simulator for their new GTN series of touchscreen GPS receivers. Though the GTN trainer isn't free, it's a good way aircraft owners to try before they buy. All that's needed is an iPad (which for pilots seems to have become de rigueur) and about $25 bucks.

With a functional representation of the new touch interface on the iPad, the GTN trainer simulates the larger-screened GTN 750. And just in case you have some sort of cognitive impairment, the app reminds you it is in demo mode and shouldn't be used for navigation. The GTN 750 screen Home screen provides access to all the GTN features. From, left-to-right, top-to-bottom, you'll find the volume and squelch control, communications frequencies, the audio panel settings, the transponder setting, and the VOR navigation frequencies. The top part of the display is static and you'll always see this data once the unit has completed its start-up.

The middle of the screen allows you to access one of the 12 basic groups of functions, a huge improvement over the 430/530 scroll-big-knob-to-view interface where the current context was not at all obvious. With the GTN you can clearly see what functions are available and there's a clear and consistent way to get back to the home screen after selecting a function.

The row at the bottom is used to display status messages, GPS sensitivity, and whether GPS or VOR is the selected navigation source.

The trainer lets you experiment with the GTN user interface in a meaningful way, though there are some odd ... features. Garmin designers seem to have figured out a way to further overload the big-knob-little-knob interface (yee gads!). Switch from the trainer app to another app and the trainer will start over booting up again, from scratch (d'oh!). Still this trainer could be just the ticket for contract pilots and instructors who might one day find themselves in front of one of these units. A okay deal for $25 ...

Cirrus SR Perform HD

For Cirrus SR20 and SR22 fliers, the free Cirrus SR Perform app gives you a fast way to calculate weight and balance as well as takeoff, cruise, and landing performance. For Cirrus renters and instructors, you can enter profiles for multiple aircraft. There's even information on lean-of-peak operations and the dreaded "red fin." All this for free? Yeaah baby!

PC-12 Digital Aircraft Flight Manual

If you're like most GA pilots, the Pilatus PC-12 holds a special appeal. The reason is simple. Unlike a Gulfstream, the average GA pilot could see themselves actually flying a PC-12. Okay, you'll need an extra couple million dollars lying around, but you don't have to own a PC-12 in order to try out the free app. In addition to weight and balance calculations, this app lets you calculate takeoff, climb, cruise, and landing performance. If you're a PC-12 pilot or operator, this app could save you a bunch of time. Even if you're not going to be flying a PC-12 anytime soon, a guy or gal can dream, right? And the app's price is right!

LiveATC

Whether you're a student pilot seeking to hone your radio skills or a certificated pilot wanting to stay sharp in your spare time, you've probably heard of LiveATC. LiveATC provides streaming audio from a network of aircraft communications receivers around the world, supported primarily by volunteers provide the necessary radio equipment and technical moxie to make it all work. Not all airports are supported, but for a mere three bucks you can get an iPhone app (it also runs on the iPad) or an Android app and listen to ATC feeds. Two things to be aware of. Many folks speaking on ATC frequencies are in serious need of remedial training and are not the best examples to emulate. Use LiveATC over a 3G connection and you risk significantly raising your monthly data consumption, so find a wifi connection.

Whoopee Indeed

This is a quick survey of just a few of the apps that can make your iPad an even more useful tool. Whether you're struggling to learn the G1000, improve your radio technique, or just kill some time in the pilot lounge between flights, the iPad can be your very own 3-dimensional blackboard.

LogTen Pro, Version 6

2011-12-26T05:00:00.000-08:00

Paper logbooks have a certain charm for both seasoned and neophyte pilots alike. Thumbing through a paper logbook is an experience that an electronic logbook has a hard time matching, but the more hours you have recorded the more difficult it is to manage and track currency and aeronautical experience. That's why I encourage pilots I train to duplicate the times recorded in their paper logbook in some sort of electronic format. Many pilots resist migrating to an electronic logbook because training flights require an instructor's signature, or because they need a place to record endorsements, or simply because they have amassed a fair amount of flight time and the thought of entering all that data is just too daunting. The latest release of LogTen Pro, a popular electronic logbook program for the Mac, iPhone, and the iPad has added features that move the electronic logbook closer to completely replacing hardcopy logbooks, including the ability to store digital signatures and endorsements.

Readin', 'Rightin', & 'Rithmetic

Most brands of paper logbooks provide precious little space for pilots and instructors to document each flight. That's why instructors either learn to write in very small letters or they end up taking multiple lines on a page to describe a single flight. Even when instructors succeed in writing in tiny letters, they still have to appropriate some blank space to record their signature, certificate number, and expiration date as required by 14 CFR 61.51.

By far the biggest disadvantage of paper logbooks is that mistakes, omissions and arithmetic errors invariably creep in. Even if you are incredibly circumspect in your math, there will be times when you'll be asked to provide statistics from you logbooks that can be time consuming to compile. For example, student pilots filling out an airman's application Form 8710 will need to provide some numbers like night cross country instruction received. Form 8710-10 (National Examiner Board-Designated Pilot Examiner Candidate Application) asks for very specific flight times, like multi-engine instrument flight instruction given. Ferreting out obscure flight times from a paper logbook can be time-consuming and error prone.

'Lectronic Solution

Several features make electronic logbook applications like LogTen Pro (LTP) appealing. You have more space to enter a description of the flight, track day and night landings, and the times for various categories will be totaled for you - a good job for a computer. Most electronic logbooks let you print out a hardcopy of your flight times, too.

LTP runs on MacOS, the iPhone, and the iPad, though you'll have to purchase separate versions of the app for each device. LTP lets you synchronize the logbooks on any and all devices that you have, just be sure you're backing up the logbook file somewhere safe. You can configure LTP so that certain hours, like PIC, are automatically populated when you enter a new flight.

You can record Hobbs and tach times as well as block-out/off/on/block-in times. Accurately record block times and LTP will automatically calculate how much of your flight was officially night time. You can also track night takeoffs and landings in a meaningful way, something that is missing from many brands of paper logbooks. Virtually all of the fields are configurable, so you can adjust LTP to be as simple or as detailed as you like.

For pilots who fly professionally, LTP can track your duty times and inform you when you've reached or are about to reach duty limits. As a flight instructor, I use this feature to track how long I've spent with each student.

Previous versions of LTP let you track things like instrument and type-specific currency, but one shortcoming was it was difficult to record multiple instrument approaches for a single flight. Version 6 lets you configure up to ten instrument approach fields for a single flight.

When an insurance company or flight club wants to know how much time you have in a specific aircraft type in the last 90 days, LTP makes it relatively easy to provide an answer. You can create your own Smart Groups that use multiple criteria to extract pretty much any flight time you might be able to imagine.

Signature Required

The coolest feature in LTP version 6 is the ability to sign a logbook entry for a specific flight. Before signing, fill in the flight details completely and correctly because once the entry is signed, it's locked. It can be unlocked to be corrected, but the instructor's signature will be removed, which makes sense. Assuming you've filled in the flight details, the signing process is relatively simple.

1. Tap on the signature button

2. Select instructor by name

3. Enter the instructor's certificate number

4. Enter expiration date of instructor's certificate

5. Instructor signs in the white box using their fingertip

I Certify ...

LTP lets instructors enter endorsements directly into a pilot's electronic logbook, but this feature is found in the Certificates section. This may be a matter of semantics, but I found that odd. It seems Endorsements should be a separate category, but I digress ...

Tap on the Certificates tab, then add a certificate, select Endorsement as the type, and the instructor can enter whatever text and limitations they desire. Instructors can also specify an expiration date which is very handy for student pilot solo endorsements.

The bad news is that instructors must manually enter the text for each endorsement. Sure, you can cut-and-paste from AC 61-65E, but your student must have that AC stored on his or her device.

Once you've signed an endorsement, it will be locked and you can store the "certificate" (endorsement) on www.mylogten.com by tapping Share and specifying an email address. MyLogTen will send an email to the specified address which will contain a link where you can view and print-out the endorsement. This data will be stored on their server for one week and will then be automatically deleted. Not the best arrangement, but it's workable.

Hardcopy, Too

If you want to print out a copy of your LTP logbook, a dizzying array of report and summary formats are provided. In addition to doing a backup of your electronic logbook file, it's probably wise to maintain a printed version, too.

Warts and Requests

LTP offers a lot of features for a lot of different pilots, from students to instructors to airline pilots. Their instructional videos on their various products are good, but each one begins with the hyperbolic claim that logging your flight time with LTP "... couldn't be easier." The truth is that with all these features and options, configuring LTP can be a bit daunting. LTP eases things a bit by asking you what your role is when you first install the app, but there are a lot of bells and whistles. If you have questions, customer support for LTP is pretty darn good.

The biggest drag with LTP version 6 is that the app start-up time on the iPad and the iPhone is noticeably longer than the previous version: It takes anywhere from 15 to 20 seconds for the app to initialize and that's a bummer if you woke your iPad up simply to record a block-out or off time. I'm not sure what LTP is doing during that delay, perhaps it's busy calculating currency or duty times? The developers have been releasing updates on a regular basis (at least two have updates to version 6 have already been released), so one hopes this will be addressed.

The mechanism for entering instructor certificate expiration dates could be better. All certificates expire at the end of the calendar month: One should only have to select the month and year of the expiration without scrolling through the day to find the end of the month. This is likely a limitation of the iOS programming interface, but still ...

If both pilot and instructor are using LTP, there should be a way to record the flight once and have it be distributed to the pilot's and the instructor's logbook. Since I already log flight times and descriptions on my iPad, it's tedious to have to enter the details twice. I'd like to see a way to enter the flight, sign the entry, and then transmit it (perhaps via email) so the student can import it into their logbook.

Instructors are required to keep records of any endorsements they have given for three years (five years for TSA-mandated endorsements). Flight schools and flying clubs often want copies of those endorsements. With the ability to sign-off flights and give electronic endorsements, LTP is just crying out for a better way share this info. An email facility with a data attachment that could be imported into LTP might do the trick.

Which brings us to iCloud support. The lack of iCloud integration is more a reflection of Apple's iCloud not being ready for prime time than it is a lack of will on the part of LTP developers. Assuming iCloud app support does become generally available, some of the sharing issues mentioned above may find a solution. Until then, LTP has limited ways to share flights and endorsements.

Out With the Old?

Will electronic logbooks replace paper logs? Will most NDBs be decommissioned? The answer to both of these questions would appear to be "yes, eventually." You may have resisted switching to an electronic logbook because you don't want to enter all the flights recorded in your paper logbook. That's certainly understandable and you may want to consider this service for converting your logbook to digital format. Given LTP's ability to record signatures and endorsements, it may finally be time for pilots to consider converting from a paper logbook to an all digital version.

Holiday Wishes

2011-12-24T13:07:00.000-08:00

Here's a modest holiday gift: A few photos that I've been saving. Wishing everyone a Happy Holiday Season and a Prosperous New Year.

Missed Approach, near Healdsburg

Wine Country Winter

A piece of history

Lake Chabot

Bay Area Winter

STS ILS 32, past LUCEE

Livermore Valley

Wine Country, again

STS ILS, approaching minima

Monterey Bay

Between Layers

Near Mt. Toro

Near San Rafael

Near Watsonville

On Top, mostly ...

Final into Palo Alto

Pt. Reyes

Sacramento Deep Water Channel

Sacramento Fall

On Top

Mooney at Sunset

Downwind, Oakland

Sonoma Valley Winter

Early Christmas

2011-12-20T14:19:00.000-08:00

To my surprise, I received an unexpected letter from the FAA in Tuesday's mail. I nervously opened the envelope and was surprised to read:

Our review of your medical records has established that you are eligible for a second-class medical certificate ... Your Authorization for Special Issuance is no longer necessary ...

It may sound odd, but having a 2nd class medical without any restrictions makes me feel like a real pilot again. Best Christmas present I've received in long time.

Jepp, Aeronav and You

2011-11-24T10:07:00.001-08:00

Active instrument instructors are frequently asked by their students, "Should I use Jeppesen charts or Aeronav charts?" The easy answer for career-oriented pilots is to use Jeppesen because that's probably what you'll be using once you land your dream flying job. For non-career pilots, the cost-effective answer is Aeronav (at least for the time being). It's fascinating to see pilots become attached to one brand of chart or the other in a Chevy/Ford, Honda/Toyota sort of way. Instrument instructors should ideally be adept at using both types of charts, but even non-instructor pilots may find themselves confronted with a brand of chart with which they aren't accustomed to seeing. Here's an overview of just how different Jepp and Aeronav are, the advantages each has to offer, and some tips for moving back and forth between the two formats.

Name and Version

All approach charts start to look alike when you're tired or stressed, so before briefing an approach it's a good idea to first verify the name and version. Both Jepp and Aeronav put the approach name in the upper right corner, but Aeronav also puts the same information in the lower right corner. Jepp puts the city/state in the upper left corner while Aeronav uses the upper and lower right corners. Locating the city and state on a chart may seem unimportant, but it's a surefire way to be sure you have the right chart given the tradition of assigning multiple names to an airport (e.g. John Wayne/Santa Ana/Orange County or Charles M. Shultz/Sonoma County/Santa Rosa).

Jeppesen Naming Conventions

Aeronav Naming Conventions

The airport identifier on Jepp charts is in the upper left corner and includes both the FAA and ICAO format. Aeronav charts show the same information (sans the ICAO identifier) in the right corner. Aeronav really needs to standardize on ICAO format for airports: It would certainly remove the common confusion between GPS waypoints representing an airport and those representing a VOR with the same name as the airport.

Flying an approach with an out-of-date chart is ... well, stupid. Jepp puts the revision and an optional effective date on the top of the chart in day-month-year format. This is inherently problematic because by themselves, these dates are meaningless. They tell you when the chart you are reading became effective, but they don't tell you if a more current version is available. The assumption is that you've applied any Jepp updates that have been released and while this works fine for electronic charts, you know what happens when you assume ... Jepp also has a proprietary indexing schema that you can memorize if you wish and they may put an amendment number on the lower left edge and the reason for the revision at the bottom of the plate. This stuff may be interesting, but it doesn't really answer the question "Is this chart the current one?"

Jepp Revision and Effective Dates

Aeronav prints a valid date range for the chart on both the left and right edge of the plan view. If today's date isn't in the range shown on the chart, the chart is out of date. Simple, straightforward, and (dare I say it?) fool proof.

Aeronav Valid Dates

Briefing Information

The BriefingStrip™ was a Jeppesen innovation designed to provide the essential information for the approach in a consistent format. Many pilots begin briefing an approach by reading this strip, though I find this technique can overlook some important information. A few years back, the Aeronav (nee NACO) folks began incorporating a similar feature they named Pilot Briefing Information. Whether you call them strips or information, they mostly contain the same stuff in a slightly different order.

Jepp Briefing Strip™

Aeronav Pilot Briefing Information

Jeppesen's Briefing Strip starts with the radio communication frequencies, then the WAAS channel or navaid frequency and approach course. Aeronav puts the WAAS channel or navaid frequency and the approach course first. Jepp includes the minimum altitude at the final approach fix and the minimum descent altitude or decision altitude. The missed approach descriptions are virtually identical. Aeronav charts display the minimum safe altitudes on the plan view. Jepp puts them in the briefing strip, except for RNAV approaches that have a terminal arrival area where Jepp also shows the MSA sectors on the plan view: There's not a lot of difference between the two products, until you consider the Notes section.

Noteworthy

Jepp, being an internationally oriented product, starts the Notes section with the units used for the altimeter setting and the transition altitude (where the flight levels start). In the US this information is superfluous, but outside the US it is indeed important. Jeppesen prefixes each note with a number, which increases readability.

Jepp Notes Format

Aeronav charts add an inverse T to indicate when non-standard takeoff minima are present or to indicate that a charted departure procedure is available for the airport.

The inverse A indicates when an approach has non-standard alternate minima. And to be consistently inconsistent, the N/A suffix can be used with the inverse A to indicate that an airport is not authorized for filing as an alternate. Jepp buries the fact that the airport can't be filed as an alternate on the separate airport info page, which is also where you'll find the airport's obstacle departure procedure. Not too handy, but it kinda makes sense.

Jepp Airport Diagram, Alternate and ODP info

Aeronav may include an inverse W on RNAV approaches to indicate that WAAS NOTAM service is not available for an airport. Translation? WAAS may not be available at all times, you may only get LNAV precision, and there won't be any WAAS service NOTAM to warn you during pre-flight planning.

Consistencies between both brands of charts in the Notes include (but are not limited to):

Procedure is not authorized at night
Visibility reduction by helicopters not authorized
Required equipment or when simultaneous reception of two navaids is required
Alternate altimeter settings
Approach course out of alignment with runway
Visual glide slope and descent angle or electronic glide slope not coincident
Conditions under which a visual descent point is not authorized

Pilot-Controlled Lighting:

Jepp lists lighting limitations in the notes section
Aeronav depicts it with an inverse L in the communications section

Circling Restrictions:

Aeronav puts circling restrictions in the Notes
Jepp puts them in the minima section, which makes a whole lot more sense

One maddening convention both charts follow is that if a different airport's surface weather is to be used, they don't provide that ATIS, ASOS, or AWOS frequency. In an age of electronic cross-referencing, this is simply criminal.

Aeronav uses the Notes section to tell you how many feet to add to the DA or MDA when using a different altimeter setting, but Jepp courteously does the math for you in the minima section.

Jepp Circling Restrictions and Minima with Alternate Alitimeter Setting

Plan View

Both charts have a North-up plan view depicting information a pilot needs to get established on a segment of the approach. Relevant obstructions are depicted on both types of charts. Note that there seem to be some discrepancies in obstruction heights on the Jepp and Aeronav charts.

Jeppesen Plan View

The highest obstruction are designated with a bold black arrow on Jepp charts and with a bold, black dot on Aeronav charts. One advantage of Jepp charts is that the Morse code for all navaids is shown, but Aeronav just gives you the navaid identifier.

Aeronav Plan View, missing some Morse Code ...

Profile View

Once established on a segment of the approach, the profile view depicts approach fixes (waypoints) and crossing restrictions for each fix. Both charts follow the convention of showing the profile from right-to left for final approach courses between 360 and 179 degrees, otherwise the profile moves from left-to-right. Given that the English language is written from left-to-right and English is the official language of aviation, changing the flow of the profile view to fit the magnetic course has always seemed a bit strange to me. Whatever ...

Neither chart product shows the profile view to scale. Aeronav just shows a diagonal line for each segment. Aeronav depicts glide slope intercept with a lightning bolt arrow and in this example, puts the graphical depiction of the missed approach procedure in a more logical and intuitive location since it is near the graphical depiction of the missed approach point on the profile view. And for those occasions when you need to conduct a circling approach, the inset map is a very handy feature.

Aeronav Profile View and Minima Section

Jeppesen clearly depicts step-downs with a level-off. Crossing restrictions are shown above the profile line, which is much more user friendly. The graphical depiction of the missed approach is located below the profile view, which is less intuitive. And when multiple minima are possible, Jepp does a thorough job of depicting those on the profile view.

Jeppesen Profile View and Minima Section

Approach Minima

Another area where these products differ is in the minima section. Jepp clearly depicts the changes in the minima when approach lighting or other components are out-of-service. With Aeronav, you must reference the Inop Components table in the front of the approach booklet - This is a really bad arrangement and one that most GA pilots hope they seldom have to deal with. Having to locate the Inop Components table when using electronic charts is B-A-D for single-pilot operations.

Jepp provides a wider range of speeds, timing from the FAF to the MAP (if appropriate), and descent rates than the Aeronav counterpart. Jepp will also depict the approach lighting that is installed, if any.

STARs and SIDs

Minor differences exist in charted arrival and departure procedures, but they aren't that big of a deal. Jepp scores some extra points by putting crossing altitude expectations next to the fix on the plan view while Aeronav buries it in the narrative.

Airport Diagrams

Aeronav provides a single airport diagram. Jepp may provide several pages of information in addition to the airport diagram, such as low-visibility taxi routes. On the airport diagram, Jepp may include Lat/Long for various parking gates, which is helpful to airline flight crews. Both products depict Hot Spots - areas where pilots historically have become confused or where runway incursions have occurred.

Extra Cost Justified?

Jeppesen has claimed that the extra cost for their product is a result of the quality control/assurance functions they perform, but the claim seems a bit hollow given how Jepp was tardy in including current RNAV approach charts for several smaller airports in California. Most recently, Jepp published an ASOS frequency for the Rio Vista airport before it was certified. I pointed this out and they removed the ASOS from the two approach charts. Then, when the ASOS was officially put into service, Jepp was one cycle behind in adding the frequency back to the charts. On several occasions I've notified Jepp about errors in their charts, but they never told me I was part of their QA team.

For their part, Aeronav makes their share of mistakes and does some weird things, too. In the case of the Rio Vista approaches, even though the ASOS frequency is published on the chart, the notes tell you to use either the Vacaville or Concord surface weather (and of course they don't give you that frequency). I've also found errors in Aeronav charts and like the Jepp folks, they are generally very receptive to feedback. After a jet blast encounter with a wayward biz jet crew a few months back, I suggested to the Aeronav folks that the depiction of one hot spot on the Oakland airport diagram wasn't in the best location. Lo and behold, they listened and changed it!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Jeppesen is much more expensive than Aeronav. Of course, if/when Aeronav products pricing structure is modified, this could change.

Keeping it All Straight

If you're an active instrument instructor or a pilot who needs to occasionally use both types of charts, you've got your hands full. Your best bet is to practice using both types of charts on a regular basis. And you don't need to be in a real aircraft to practice: You can fly any approach in your arm chair or in a simulator for little or no cost. It's certain that I haven't covered all the differences, advantages and disadvantages of each brand of chart product. If you think I have missed something important or have your own tips and tricks to share, I'm all ears.

Week off

2011-11-22T08:52:00.000-08:00

Pilot de-briefing room

I'm taking a short rest from flying and blogging, but here are some photos I've been saving up. Wishing all my readers a safe and restful Thanksgiving holiday ...

Start of work day

Cup of good coffee, new aircraft, great view, life is good.

Hot air balloons? Winds must be calm ...

No time for fish-n-chips ...

Steep spirals near Honker Bay

Marine layer pushing in

Rio Vista Afternoon

Rio Vista Sunset

End of the penultimate flight for today

Last flight of the day

iPad EFB Gotchas

2011-11-18T05:50:00.000-08:00

Pilots everywhere have been using iPads as Electronic Flight Bags for over a year now in all kinds of aircraft and some ... umm ... interesting incidents are starting to be reported. The iPad, combined with one of several EFB software packages, is a very useful device. But perfect it ain't. Here are a few common iPad gotchas and ways to avoid them.

Out-of-Date/Missing Charts

You haven't flown in a few weeks, so you make plans to get airborne, head out to the airport, but the weather isn't cooperating. You are IFR current so you launch your favorite EFB app to prepare an IFR flight plan only to learn your charts have expired. This happens more often than you might imagine, especially for infrequent flyers. If you have internet access, go ahead and start the update but expect a delay. If you don't have 'net access or if the access is really slow, you could be inconvenienced in a big way.

Solution? Do a dry run a day or two before you plan to go flying: Launch your EFB app and ensure your chart data is up-to-date. You can also keep track of the chart expiration dates in your electronic or paper calendar as a reminder so you aren't blindsided.

GPS Reception

If you purchased a 3G iPad and rely on its built-in GPS, you may find in some circumstances GPS satellite lock can be lost. Depending on the aircraft you fly and satellite coverage at a particular point in time, you may be fine or you may not. Of course you shouldn't be relying on your iPad for anything other than situational awareness, but losing GPS coverage can be seriously distracting at a high-workload moment.

Solution? Trying to keep your iPad from being shadowed by aircraft structures may help, but there are only so many ways you can hold your iPad in flight and still have it be usable. Another solution is to use an external, bluetooth GPS such the GNS 5870 MFI GPS Receiver or the newer Dual XGPS150 Bluetooth GPS Receiver that comes with it's own rubber mat for laying on the glare shield. If you prefer a plug-in solution, the Bad Elf GPS Receiver could be just the ticket.

Bluetooth Blues

Another distraction is discovering that your bluetooth GPS receiver is not connected to your iPad. I see this fairly regularly since upgrading to iOS 5.0.1, but futzing around with bluetooth settings isn't something you want to try while hand-flying in IMC.

Solution? I find going into the iPad settings, turning off bluetooth and then turning it back on to be the most reliable way to reestablish the connection. If you are using a bluetooth GPS receiver, make sure it is communicating properly with your iPad before you takeoff.

All EFBs are Equal?

Flying through the LA Basin is a heck of a time to discover that your chart app doesn't have a graphic depiction of the VFR transition that Socal is asking you to fly. If you're using ForeFlight and you don't have a back-up paper VFR terminal area chart (TAC), this could happen to you.

Solution? For one, Skycharts Pro does include the VFR TAC marginalia as well as the fly charts from the back of the TAC. If you haven't purchased that app then you may want to invest in a paper TAC or print out the necessary information from a site like SkyVector.

Hold Your Cards

If you own a 3G iPad and you rely on the built-in GPS, be advised that if the SIM card rattles loose you'll see a "no sim" alert and you'l loose GPS, too.

Solution? Reseating the sim card usually fixes this issue, but you might want to consider an external bluetooth or plug-in GPS as a back-up.

App Crash

Most iPad apps seem to be pretty stable, but having your EFB app crash at an inopportune time can be a real drag, especially during an instrument approach. Witnessing this happen to an instrument student of mine was an eye-opener. He not only had to re-launch the app and wait for it to initialize, he had to navigate back to the approach chart he was using.

Solution? There's no way to completely immunize yourself from app crashes, but there are a few preventative things you can do. Some folks feel it is a good idea to shutdown and restart your iPad every few days. Same goes for syncing your iPad on a regular basis. Next, become familiar with your EFB app's user interface while sitting in your living room in a nice comfy chair. If your EFB app allows you to mark favorite approaches or create binders of approaches for a trip, by all means use these features. Anything that helps you better organize charts will also help you locate those charts more quickly if you have to re-launch and start over.

Overheating

In hot weather it is possible for an iPad to overheat since the device is cooled solely by conduction. When this happens, the iPad shuts down until it cools off. You can't control the weather, but there are a few things you can do.

Solution? Put your iPad to sleep when you aren't using the display. Keep the iPad out of direct sunlight. During refueling stops, don't leave your iPad in the sun. Avoid folio cases that completely enclose the iPad and cases that are dark in color since they trap and absorb heat. If your iPad does overheat, get it out of the sun, direct a fresh air vent toward it, and wait.

Getting Juiced

The iPad has outstanding battery life, but the battery might not last very long if you forget to charge your iPad the night before you fly. The same problem can happen with external bluetooth GPS receivers, especially the GNS 5870 since its capacitive-touch power switch makes it all too easy to turn on accidentally.

Solution? Invest in a USB charger solely for use in the aircraft. Some adapters take a long time to re-charge the iPad, but at least they'll power the iPad and keep the battery from draining further. Turning the brightness down can also reduce the iPad's energy consumption.

What's Your Problem?

Had an interesting iPad technology moment? Post a comment and let others learn from your experience.

Driver's License = Medical Certificate?

2011-11-14T07:25:00.000-08:00

One nice thing about AOPA's new, PR-oriented management is that it's oh so easy to discern their agenda. DVD-of-the-month club, life insurance, medical certification assistance, legal assistance, credit cards, and numerous other "member benefits" are being hawked to each and every AOPA member on a regular basis. AOPA seems thirsty for money. Quoting John Ciardi: "May you stay solvent by whatever means are available to you."

Issues that AOPA reports repeatedly in their newsletters and magazines have obviously been designated as their top priorities. These priorities would seem to include bringing back BARR (Block Aircraft Registration Requests) so no one will know how business jets are being used, just saying "no" to user fees, just saying "yes" to NextGen and ADS-B, and now advocating the elimination of the 3rd class medical certificate.

The proposal at hand seems to be "If you hold a driver's license, that's good enough to be PIC and you don't need a 3rd class medical." One would assume the requirements for 1st and 2nd class medical certificates would not change and would still be required for commercial and airline transport pilots. It seems that with an appropriate pilot's certificate and driver's license as a medical, this proposal would allow someone to fly not just the light-sport/flying-lawn-furniture sorts of aircraft, but presumably aircraft with a maximum gross takeoff weight as high as 12,499 pounds. This sounds ridiculous just typing the words.

The criteria for a third class medical certificate are remarkably liberal, giving rise to the old joke: "If you can see lightning and hear thunder, you can get a medical certificate." Now if you have a medical condition that could unexpectedly render you unconscious or otherwise impair you, that's another story. Pilots with diabetes, heart conditions, high blood pressure, cognitive impairments all come under scrutiny. As well they should, but the FAA medical certification division has still done a pretty good job of allowing for pilots with special circumstances to obtain a medical certificate. For example ...

Another complaint is that getting a medical certificate is a hassle. Think about that: If you're under 40 years of age, your 3rd class medical certificate is good for five years (60 calendar months). If you're over 40, it's still good for 2 years (24 calendar months). A trip to the AME every two or five years is hardship? Give me a break! Now if you have a special medical condition, you will have to jump through hoops, provide test results, and you often have to wait for approval. That's a hassle with which I am all too familiar.

Long time readers of this blog know that in 2008 my 2nd class medical certificate was revoked for a year after I experienced a disqualifying medical episode. The FAA's revocation was explicit and, it seemed to me, a bit rude. After all, I had voluntarily reported my situation, I had done the right thing, I was following the rules. The thing is, many pilots don't like to follow the regs and that likely explains the FAA's serious tone.

Several pilots emailed me or commented on by blog suggesting I was foolish for telling the FAA. Some suggested I should have just kept it to myself rather than blog about the experience. Another told me I should have just monitored my own condition, made my own decisions about my fitness for flight, that I should have been the judge, stuff in that vein. My ability to earn an income was significantly hampered until the FAA granted a special issuance 2nd class medical certificate. Based on this experience, some might think that I'd be strongly in favor of what AOPA is advocating. In point of fact, I'm not.

Medical certification is an important part of aviation safety even if many pilots choose to keep their medical problems to themselves rather than risk being grounded. Some might say the FAA 3rd class medical exam is perfunctory and ineffective, but the applicant must fill out a medical history questionnaire. Falsifying or misrepresenting that medical history is serious business. The safeguards against drivers with medical problems is potentially even more problematic. In California, Health and Safety Code Section 103900 requires the treating physician to report a driver's health problems. If a driver chooses not to be treated or doesn't reveal a problem to their physician, it would seem that no one would be the wiser. And drivers are not required to undergo regular physical exams.

In light of AOPA's support of the NextGen initiative to increase aviation safety and utility, it's odd they would, at the same time, be arguing to implement what could very well become a sort of "Don't ask, Don't tell" policy. AOPA's proposal would have us flying in a world where pilots who have potentially serious medical problems could act as PIC without a medical history or regular check-ups and status reports. The importance of addressing and dealing with medical issues would be further minimized and the status quo of sweeping things under the rug would be maintained. If AOPA's constant clamoring for a driver's license medical certificate isn't about safety, perhaps it's about more potential AOPA members. More members, more money.

This brings me to the late Doug Johnson, Lt. Col. USAF (Ret.), whom I met while teaching at the Alameda Aero Club. Doug founded the flying club and he continued to be its driving force after the Alameda NAS was closed and the club moved to Oakland. Doug was plainspoken and when ladies weren't present, Doug could curse a blue streak. And all of this was put forth in an Arkansas drawl that'd make you think you were standing in front of a ribald version of Foghorn Leghorn. Doug had been a B17 captain during WWII and survived his share of bombing missions. He had plenty of opinions on most any topic you could come up with. In short, Doug was larger that life.

Doug was always hanging around the airport, but I never saw him go flying. I asked him why and he explained that one day, driving to the airport, he'd woken up, shaken but uninjured, with his car in a ditch. After a slew of medical tests with no conclusive results, Doug made his choice. "Boywah" he'd said, "That day forward, I couldn't go flyin' without 'nother pilot on board. What if it happened again, with ma wife onboard? What if an innocent person on the ground got killed 'cause of me?" The doctors said it was okay for Doug to drive, and drive he did, but I suspect if Doug were alive today and he heard about AOPA's proposal, he'd be all over them like white on rice.

If you've lost your medical certificate, if you're unable to fly under sport pilot rules, I understand that being grounded sucks. I hated it the first time it happened to me and I know that at some point (hopefully in the distant future) I may very well be grounded again. All pilots need to remember that each one of us may have to give up being PIC. It may not be popular to say, but a time will come when our love of flying must be overshadowed by the safety of those around us and the loved ones who fly with us.

Diversion, Conversion

2011-11-11T16:56:00.000-08:00

Cruising along at 5,500 feet, en route to the Columbia airport, my student had good reason to believe he’d never get there. Sure enough, in preparation for his upcoming private pilot check ride, I asked him divert to another airport. He began circling over a chosen landmark, produced a VFR chart, drew a course line, estimated the heading, distance, time, and fuel required to the new airport, all the while maintaing altitude and looking for traffic. His juggling of these priorities was impressive, but he soon discovered that his chart had been folded so many times that the frequencies for the new destination airport had been rendered illegible. Flustered, he scrambled to locate his Airport/Facility Directory while I kept an eye out for traffic and mused about how many times a day pilots must now be asking their instructors “Is it okay for me to use my iPad?”

I’ve logged nearly 1200 hours since my first flight with the iPad 1 and frankly, I’ve never looked back. When I was still searching for the ideal EFB back in 2009, I explained how the FAA doesn’t require any certification or qualification for EFBs under most Part 91 operations. Just recently, the FAA’s own Safety Briefing publication had yet another article making the same observations. Given that pilots are adopting EFBs faster than you can say “decommissioned NDB,” it’s time for instructors to start making EFBs part of the training they offer as well as part of their own training. I tell student pilots I train “Go ahead and use an iPad if you want, but be prepared with a credible back-up strategy in case your iPad fails or your instructor decides to simulate a failure.”

Before you start gnashing your teeth, complaining about newfangled gadgets, and pining for the good old days of slide rules, cigarettes smoking in the cockpit, and navigating via A-N Range, consider that combining old techniques with new approaches can actually aid in teaching pilots to that elusive correlative level of knowledge. The key concept here is combining approaches, not rejecting one in favor of the other. Here’s an overview of the old school approach, followed by some mash-ups of familiar approaches with new tools and software.

Old School Planning

The first half dozen times through the cross-country flight planning process, I like student pilots to do navigation calculations manually so they’ll understand and appreciate what their EFB or flight planning software will eventually be doing for them. My favorite nav log form is available for free from Dauntless-Software. The two basic variations in nav logs involve whether the True Course (TC) is first corrected for magnetic variation or for the wind correction angle.

ATC uses and refers to magnetic directions, so I say cut to the chase and go magnetic. Winds aloft forecasts are provided with true directions, so you'll need to account for that if you choose the TC-VAR-MC-WCA-MH format.

Virtually all nav logs end up with a Compass Heading (CH), to which I say “Who cares?” If you always set your aircraft's heading indicator using the compass correction card, calculating a CH is simply gilding the lily. If your aircraft doesn't have a heading indicator, then by all means compute the CH until such time as you manage to catch up with the later half of 20th century aviation technology.

I teach students to complete a paper nav log in this general sequence.

Calculate climb performance and ground speed
Determine the location of the Top-of-Climb (TOC)
Calculate cruise performance and ground speed
Determine the location of the Time-of-Descent (TOD).
Divide the course between the TOC and TOD into legs of equal length.

Aircraft consume more fuel and have a slower ground speed during the climb to altitude, so calculating where you'll reach the top-of-climb (TOC) is important. And if you want to avoid arriving high and hot, the time-of-descent is something you’ll want to plan for. Want to use an electronic E6B instead of a slide rule to do these calculations? Fine by me.

With TOC and TOD marked on your chart, try dividing the remaining course into legs of equal length. Sometimes this works, sometimes there aren’t good landmarks. If defining equal leg distances does work, you only need to calculate time, fuel, and distance for one leg to have the numbers for the other legs. Choosing landmarks on a paper chart is the ultimate in flexibility: You can choose whatever you want. With an EFB or internet-based planner, waypoints selection is as simple.

High-Tech Planning

The sad fact is we're well into the second millennium and there aren’t many computerized flight planners that account for the time- or fuel-to-climb. A few internet-based planners that do (to varying degrees) include DUAT (not to be confused with DUATS), AOPA’s Flight Planner, and FlightAware.

Once you’ve entered a profile for your aircraft, the DUAT flight planner will provide the location TOC and TOD in latitude/longitude format. Not terribly handy, but it also provides a magnetic course and distance which does turn out to be useful. More on that later.

The browser-based flight planners from AOPA and FlightAware both account for fuel consumed in the climb and descent, but they don’t tell you where TOC and TOD are located. Bummer about that.

FlightAware’s planner adds some value by including the estimated fuel costs for various altitudes, winds aloft forecast, and routes. In this example you can see that you’d only save a few bucks by climbing to 11,000 feet versus 9,000 feet. To access FlightAware’s flight planning features, you’ll need to set up an account. Don’t worry, it’s a free and simple process. Be advised that FlightAware’s planner doesn’t work completely on the iPad browsers I’ve tried.

So what about specifying waypoints that aren’t pre-defined objects like airports, VORs or airway intersections? Most planners allow you to enter your own waypoints as Lat/Long coordinates or as a VOR-radial-distance. That’s not terribly user-friendly, but it works.
You can add custom checkpoints in ForeFlight’s map view by tapping on the map view. A dialog will appear allowing you to add the location as a user-defined coordinate. If you tap on your course line, it’s easy to inadvertently change the course slightly and you won’t know the leg distance until you’ve tapped, but there you go.

If you know the lat/long for a waypoint, you can enter that into a ForeFlight route. Below, the lat/long that DUAT calculated for TOC has been entered as a TOC waypoint.

If you know the distance and radial from a VOR, you can enter a waypoint in ForeFlight using theta/rho format: VOR_id/radial/distance. This approach also works with airport identifiers. Below, I’ve taken the TOC and TOD data from the DUAT flight planner output and entered them as waypoints in the format KOAK/133/16 and KSBA/315/29.

Nav Log in Action

Using a paper nav log in flight starts with recording your departure time. For short trips, just record the two-digit minutes after the hour. Then to calculate estimated time of arrival (ETA) for the next checkpoint, add the time your off time to the estimated time en route (ETE) for the first checkpoint. When you reach the checkpoint, record the actual time of arrival (ATA), add that to the next ETE and you have the ETA for the next checkpoint. If your ETA calculations consistently differ from the ATA, consider doing an winds aloft and TAS calculation.

ForeFlight kinda-sorta follows the paper nav log tradition, but the assumption is that ForeFlight will use GPS information to calculate your estimated time en route for each leg in real-time based on your current ground speed. I find ForeFlight’s nav log display a bit cumbersome and difficult to read in flight, but that could be due to my 50-something eyesight. If you want a historical record, why not combine a paper nav log with your EFB?

Electronic Diversion

Planning an in-flight diversion with an app like ForeFlight is the height of simplicity.

Tap and hold on the airport to which you wish to divert
A dialog will appear showing the known waypoints in the area
Tap on the orange D-> button for the selection you

EFBs can provide real-time calculation of the desired track, ETE, and fuel consumed, but you can do the same sort of thing with many panel mounted GPS. Electronic diversions are so easy and with no plotter, pencil and calculator to juggle, it's no wonder some pilots feel they are cheating. Hand-calculated diversions can be just as dangerous as fixating on pretty colors on a moving map. Having a quick way to calculate a diversion in real life gives you more time to look outside for traffic and manage whatever emergency or urgent situation you're facing. That seems like a good thing, not the work of the devil.

Combine and Conquer

Whether it be in paper format, electronic format, or a combination of the two, preparing and using a nav log in flight can be a curiously satisfying experience. Teaching student pilots the old ways is still a valuable part of the aviation education equation, but introducing and integrating new tools doesn't need to detract from the experience. High tech solutions can enhance accuracy and safety. As with anything in aviation, understanding the limitations of technology is a more productive approach that rejecting new techniques out-of-hand. To my mind, if a pilot can learn the basics and then combine old school and way cool, that strikes at the heart of the vaunted correlative level of knowledge.

Five Reason to NOT upgrade to iOS 5

2011-10-26T04:21:00.000-07:00

The latest update to the operating systems for iPhones and iPads (known as iOS) as well as for Macs (MacOS) has not been without problems. Some of the issues are significant for pilots using the iPad as an electronic flight bag. While I normally feel relatively comfortable being on the bleeding edge of Apple's software releases, the latest releases of iOS and MacOS do not give me a warm fuzzy feeling. Those who have upgraded need to understand the unintended consequences of Apple's design changes.

Reason #1 - Data going missed

My original buying iPad advice for pilots on a budget was to opt for an iPad with less memory. 16Gb seemed to be fine for most of us, but the new WiFi syncing feature in iOS 5 has changed that advice. Apps that need to store a lot of data (like aviation charts) must now store that data in a user cache. The motivation was to force apps to store data in a location that would not be backed-up so as to reduce the amount of data transferred during WiFi syncing. Unfortunately, the user cache in iOS 5 is automatically cleaned up by the iOS if it starts running low on space. Download several seasons of Treme to your iPad along with the latest release from Coldplay and you might find you no longer have the approach charts you need. A cogent explanation can be found here.

It appears Apple engineers and marketeers made this design choice because they assumed that iPad users would always has access to a fast internet connection. Such hubris! Not everyone lives and works in an environment with 24/7 access to a blindingly fast network. Many of us use our iPads offline for the simple reason that internet access may not be available. In one fell swoop, iOS 5 threatens to hobble what is one of the best EFB platform produced to date by violating one of the basic tenants of any computing platform - data integrity. This cleaning feature needs to be undone, a setting needs to be provided to override this behavior, or another option needs to provided to apps that store a bunch of offline data. And something must be done and soon.

Reason #2 - Multi-tasking Gestures, for some

in a classic case of the large print giveth and the small print taketh away, iPad 1 users may have been led to think than upgrading to iOS 5 would provide them access to multi-tasking gestures, but only iPad 2 users get that feature. There's no valid technical reason for this restriction and since the half-life of these devices is relatively short, this appears to be a sort of planned obsolescence.

If Apple sticks it to customers who purchased the original iPad, the result may only be fewer loyal customers lining up to buy the iPad 3. There is this hack that purportedly allows iPad 1 users who upgrade to enable gestures in iOS 5. I haven't tried this hack myself or seen it, so use it at your own risk.

Reason #3 - iCloud just ain't there ... yet

The introduction of iCloud is reminiscent of the introduction MobileMe where allegedly there was a meeting with Steve Jobs and some of the developers. The story goes that Jobs asked for an explanation of what MobileMe was supposed to do. After listening to the explanations, Jobs purportedly asked "So why the ^%$ doesn't it do that?"

I'm accustomed to Apple designs being easy-to-use, but I must confess to being a bit flummoxed by iCloud. With MobileMe and iDisk, one could purchase storage space and store whatever data you wanted. The iCloud implementation is anything but open. You can store data from Numbers, Keynote, and Pages on iCloud, but I can't seem to store proprietary data. Supposedly one can create folders to organize stored material, but I can't seem to figure it out.

If you turn on the iCloud Backup, the good news is you won't need a desktop device to backup your iPad or iPhone. The bad news is you may fill up your complementary 5Gb of iCloud storage in a hurry. Material purchased from iTunes is stored for free, but I don't buy Apple's claim that 5GB goes a long way. Sure you can select which apps get backed up to the iCloud, but that turns in a part-time job. This is not the seamless user experience that Apple has been known for and the skeptic in me wonders if perhaps the real intent is for the sale of 100Gb of iCloud storage at $100/year to become a significant revenue stream.

Reason #4 - Mail, Contacts, and Calendar issues

For users who rely on mail, contact, and calendar access on multiple devices, iCloud is a mess. As a contract pilot and flight instructor I use three different devices - Macbook, iPhone, and iPad. Right after upgrading I was unable to retrieve email on any of my devices because iCloud complained my userid or password was invalid. Apparently Apple's servers were getting slammed because after eight hours, I was able to retrieve mail. Yet on my iPad I still see a message saying my Mac ID or password is incorrect. I went to the iCloud web site and changed my password to force things to reset, but when I changed my password on my iPad, it automatically changed back to the old password. The bizarre thing is that I can still retrieve my email! Avoiding this sort of time-consuming crap is why I started using Apple products in the first place.

My iCal calendar migrated just fine, but I can no longer share it with my wife (who hasn't yet upgraded to the latest version of MacOS). A big step backward.

Reason #5 - Security Issues

Every cloud-computing implementation is supposed to be convenient, but a lot of us seem to be ignoring (or denying) the possible security issues. Trivial uses of iCloud include storing purchased music and videos, but storing private or sensitive data is a much bigger risk. Letting someone else store your data online is an especially convenient arrangement for thieves, criminals, and others who might not have your best interests at heart.

Knowing where your data is being stored and the laws that affect the jurisdiction where your data is stored is something many users don't consider.

Any cloud data storage provider worth their salt should be monitoring access to their cloud, but this is an expensive undertaking. Aside from basic physical and electronic access security, it's not clear than any cloud provider is doing much to ensure user data is not being compromised.

Root of all Evil

As any company becomes more and more successful, the inevitable erosion in quality of customer service occurs. I don't know if it's the mania for continued growth, the thirst for more income streams, the influx of marketeers and bean-counters, or just the sheer number of user, but Apple's image appears to this long-time customer as being more than a bit tarnished.

iOS 5 ... Debacle

2011-10-15T22:29:00.000-07:00

Let me get right to the point:

If you own an original iPad and you have enabled multi-tasking gestures using Xcode, don't upgrade to iOS 5 just yet. If you do upgrade, you'll lose multi-tasking gestures altogether. What's more, you won't be able to re-enable multi-tasking gestures with Xcode. Simply put, you're screwed. At least for now.

*** Update on 10/21/11 ***
There is a workaround/hack for enabling gestures on an iPad 1 with iOS 5. It's described here.
*** Update ***

Apple makes a lot of good decisions and design choices, but any human organization makes mistakes. In this case the mistake was to disable multi-tasking gestures in iOS 5 for the original iPad. If you have an iPad 2, you're cool - go ahead and upgrade. Perhaps the decision to discriminate against the original iPad was made to ... um ... encourage those users to upgrade to the iPad 2. If so, this was bush league, below the belt, bull$hit.

To my knowledge, there is no technical reason to not allow the iPad access to multi-tasking gestures. I enabled this feature, using Xcode, for at least a dozen iPad owners running iOS 4.#.#. And guess what? Multi-tasking gestures worked just fine. The iPad 2's faster processor was not required. And I know several pilots who rely on multi-tasking gestures for their iPad to be a more useful and well-rounded EFB.

So what can you do?

Apple may choose to fix this. In fact, it could have been a mistake and not a marketing choice. For now, if you are an original iPad owner, don't upgrade to iOS 5.

If you are an original iPad owner and you've already upgraded or if you are miffed (I would be if I hadn't already upgraded to an iPad 2), go here and give Apple an earful. If enough people complain, surely Apple will see the error of their ways.

Move Toward the Light

2011-10-06T10:31:00.000-07:00

Much has been said about the passing of Steve Jobs; his accomplishments, the way he was ousted from Apple only to return years later and turn the company around. The way he was instrumental in creating iconic personal computing products, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. Jobs was central in the success of Pixar and setting new standards for computer animated entertainment, too. To my mind, his most important contributions went beyond the success of any consumer product or movie. Who Jobs was and what he embodied was a rare type of ... dare we say it? Genius.

What first drew me to Apple products over 15 years ago was ease-of-use. I'd worked on a variety of operating systems on a variety of platforms from MVS and VM on IBM 390 mainframes to various flavors of UNIX on workstations from Sun, HP and others. When I started consulting, I wanted a platform that would just work without me having to futz with it. MacOS products weren't always perfect, but they worked very well for me. The fact that products themselves were elegant was just a bonus. Sure, Apple products cost a bit more, but in the long run I found they paid for themselves in terms of reliability and simplicity.

This strikes at the heart of what Jobs seemed obsessed with: Hardware and software that, to the greatest extend possible, stayed out of the way of the user. He even had the hutzpah to believe that he knew better what the user needed that the users themselves. Jobs eschewed just giving customers just what they wanted. Instead, he encourage, cajoled, threatened and drove his employees to create what the customer actually needed. And about 90% of the time, he was right.

When the iPod was introduced, my first impression of the user interface was that it was bare bones, even amateurish. It turns out I was wrong. The iPod became wildly popular because it wasn't about the device, it was about allowing the user to access and enjoy music. It was all about the music. Oh, and digital rights management, too, because there needed to be money coming in to fund more ground-breaking designs.

If genius is defined as vision, then it is also equal parts arrogance and tenacity in pursuing what you believe in. In a world where businesses simply want to post good numbers for the next two quarters and to produce short-lived, blockbuster products, regardless of whether or not they are good or even excellent products, Jobs was an anachronism. He had the long view and the nerve to stay the course. And he had the ability to convince others to work with him to achieve those goals.

People who know have told me that working for Jobs intimidating. He could be demanding, brutally frank, maybe even a bastard because he expected that whatever the product, it had to be the best that they could produce. It had to be excellent. It had to be great or embody greatness. Jobs didn't always succeed, but even his failures were inspiring.

With Job's passing the world has lost something, but we've gained something, too. Not just the legacy of his products and the successful companies he led. We have an example of a different way to conduct business and a model of success that is defined not simply by profit and market share, but by the single-minded pursuit of greatness and an abiding respect for the end user. With hard work and the long view, it's possible for any one of us to move toward the light. That is the true Jobs Legacy.

Go For the Burn(out)

2011-09-28T17:28:00.000-07:00

A very busy summer has left me with blogger fatigue and general irritability. I changed my blog template. Didn't help. So I'm going to whinge on for a bit, but I'm including some pretty pictures at the end. You may just want to skip ahead ...

And That's Not All!

AOPA is really annoying me, whining about how the FAA should provide tail-number blocking for wealthy aircraft owners. Business jets make sense for business (Duh! Hence the name!). If business aircraft are so profitable then they don't need tax breaks and accelerated depreciation schedules to make them make business sense. Right?

AOPA keeps sending me solicitations for life insurance, renter's insurance, and the latest - the opportunity to purchase a subscription to their DVD series. Oh, and you can return the DVD or just recycle it. Who do they think they are, National Geographic?

The editorial tone of AOPA Pilot sure has changed. First there is the faux controversy of their Dogfight series where two diametrically opposed writers (or so we're led to believe) disagree with each other about whether pitch controls airspeed or altitude. Yawn! Or a photo spread about aviation tattoos. Very hip and edgey! What's next, aviation piercings?

AOPA members shouldn't be surprised at the changes that have taken place. Just enter the AOPA president's name into a Google search and see what he was doing back in the early 1990's.

See what I mean? Irritable ...

Amazon to the Rescue!

Amazon has cancelled their associates program for residents of California. Why? Because California legislators and the governor passed legislation that requires them to collect sales tax. Being the magnanimous folks they are, the management at Amazon pulled the plug. Okay, fine. Then they turn around and start lobbying California legislators for sales tax amnesty. Hello? Amazon? Did you not read the news about the State's budget hovering around the edge of the porcelain pony? We're trying to have a civilization here!

So I'm no longer an Amazon Associate. I'm all busted up about that ...

No Taxes, No User Fees

I'll be the first to admit that user fees for GA will hurt. I'd hate to see them implemented. On the other hand, a lot of people seem to be in a budget-slashing, anti-government mood. To quote a line from The Right Stuff - "No bucks, no Buck Rogers." The aviation gasoline tax is apparently not bringing in enough moolah, so something has to give.

Many pilots have multiple personalities when it comes to taxes and government. No one wants to pay, no one want to be regulated, but everyone is upset when local airports can't make ends meet. Do they think runways, taxiways, control towers, ATC salaries and FBO facilities simply appear out of thin air? Where will the funds for the much vaunted NextGen come from? Maybe AOPA can donate proceeds from one of the marketing promotions ...

NOTAM Madness

There are a bunch of NOTAMs for my local airport due to a bunch of construction projects and the cranes and equipments associated with same. While trying to explain the NOTAM system to a student pilot recently, he had an epiphany: "The trick to NOTAMs is knowing which ones to ignore." Leave it to a neophyte to come up with the good insights.

The NOTAM system has been changed so that it is supposedly easier to wade through, but the almost indecipherable content of each NOTAM remains maddeningly the same. Dates and times in the most foreign format imaginable. Contractions and abbreviations that make normal human beings cringe. And mind-numbing legal boilerplate makes it seem like the FAA and TSA actually want someone to bust a TFR.

Comment Etiquette

I've been getting more and more comments that are lame attempts at using my blog for third-party marketing. The comments are usually complimentary, but they contain a link to some site that often has little to do with the post I've written. How very crafty and clever! Folks who post these things need to know that they aren't fooling anyone and their lame links will never see the light of day on this blog.

Some commenters post things when they really want to send me a message. Please, use my email address. It's shown on the right edge of my blog. If you're using a blog reader, you may need to actually visit my blog directly to see it. Please don't comment if you're trying to send me a personal message. Use email, 'K?

If you don't agree with something I written and you want to post a comment, by all means do so. Keep in mind that I have the final say in which comments are published. Comments that I find rude, inflammatory or otherwise piss me off will go to /dev/null. If you don't understand irony, this might not be the place for you and you are hereby advised to avoid reading my blog. If you don't like my ideas, that's fine, too. Don't waste your time with verbal jousting, move on to another blog you like. Or send a letter to the AOPA editors and tell them how much you like arguments about engine leaning and racy photos of tattoos.

At least I'm not irritated when I'm flying.

Now the pretty pictures I promised ...

Alameda Sunset

Another Bay Area Sunset

FAF VOR 6 at KAPC

Odd Valley Stratus for Summertime

Delta Farmland

Slipping the Surly Bonds

More Odd Stratus

Right turn 090, Join V244, Resume Own Nav ...

Montezuma Windmills

More Windmills

Tiny Full Moon (see it?)

Northwest of KNUQ

Sonoma Valley Sunset

Northeast of Eden

Vectors across the Bay

VFR, Kinda, Sorta ...

Contact Norcal Departure ...

Salt Ponds and Stratus

Again with the Salt Ponds?

San Pablo Bay at Sunset

Guess Where?

Short final, KHAF RNAV RWY 12

Again with the marine layer?

Surreal Delta Light

Alameda Estuary at Sunset

Captain Snarky

2011-09-06T15:43:00.000-07:00

Don't Use for Navigation!

The mainstream aviation press is saying good things about Jeppesen Mobile FD, but I'm not sure where to start. As a long-time Jeppesen customer, I've found myself saying things like "Sure Jeppesen products are more expensive and offer fewer features than other iPad EFB solutions, but this is just the first release." Or "Jeppesen has always offered a premium product and heck, some major airlines are planning to use their software on the iPad - That's pretty good." Or "Someday Jeppesen will provide MacOS-based installers, I'm sure of it." Then I remember that one of the goals of blogging is to provide readers with the unvarnished truth. After many hours of using Jeppesen Mobile FD in-flight, here's what I see as the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Bang for the Buck

Let's get this out front, in case you haven't heard: Jeppesen Mobile FD subscriptions are overpriced. Not just a little, waaay overpriced. Currently there is only support for geo-referenced en route charts in Jepp Mobile FD and a subscription covering just California costs about $125 a year. For $150 a year, I get ForeFlight with geo-referenced en route and approach charts for all the areas supported by Aeronav - That's the entire US, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the South Pacific. Add in ForeFlight's weather briefing and flight planning features and it's pretty easy to justify the annual cost.

A fairer comparison to Jeppesen Mobile FD is SkyCharts Pro, which offers only minimal weather features. SkyCharts Pro costs $20 a year for the same US chart coverage as ForeFlight. Compare that to many hundreds of dollars a year for similar Jepp coverage and, well that's just embarrassing.

Jeppesen does provide chart support for many foreign countries, but for US fliers it's hard to justify the cost.

The Good

Jeppesen has nice chart products that are clean and easy to read. Jepp charts provide added value with touches like a wider range of approach speeds and descent or climb rates in feet per minute. Jepp also describes the effects of inoperative equipment right in the minima section, which is very user-friendly.

Don't Use for Navigation!

Jeppesen adds some value, but since Aeronav adopted the briefing strip format a while back, there's not a lot of difference between the two product lines. Jepps don't provide an inset map like the Aeronav charts, which is a huge dis-advantage when conducting a circling approach. Yet pilots get attached to Jepps and find Aeronav charts foreign and clumsy, leading to an argument not unlike North-up versus Track-up or the old pitch/power debate. Whatever ...

Once Jepp Mobile FD is installed, downloading charts seems simple enough if you have a fast network. I'm blessed with a fast ADSL network (you can throw a rock from my front porch and hit the telco's switch building), so the updates seldom take more than a few minutes to install.

The Mobile FD interface has a clean appearance and the chart display is good. There's an easy-to-access screen dimmer, too. There is the issue of landscape format SIDs and STARs, but Aeronav has the same problem.

Jepp Mobile FD's flight planning function lets you specify alternate airports, a great feature and something Garmin has neglected in their GPS flight planning interface for over a decade. And Mobile FD lets you quickly access the terminal procedures for all the airports in your flight plan, something SkyCharts Pro and ForeFlight could learn from.

Wart Factor

The flight planning feature understands most victor airways, with some caveats. If your route includes intersecting victor airways, you must include the intersection that the airways have in common. The flight planner doesn't seem to understand departure or arrival procedures either. Bummer about that.

See the Clear button above the route? Tap on it and you clear not just the route, but all the airports, too! This is dumb for a bunch of obvious reasons. First, said button is located just above route, which leads one to assume that tapping it will clear just the route. Second, the button doesn't say Clear All. Third, there are a bunch of times I'd want to clear a route during the planning stage without blowing away the departure, destination, and alternate airports. Lastly, there is already an X button at the end of each of the airport fields so you can clear them individually. I don't know who is doing Jeppesen's U/I design and usability testing, but they could use some help.

Having spent the better part of my adult life involved in software development, I get the impression that time-to-market pressures overshadowed Jeppesen's QA and acceptance testing. The first version of Mobile FD had more bugs than an Illinois barbecue in June. Subsequent versions have gotten better. The latest version finally offers geo-referencing, but only on en route charts. That's a step in the right direction, but the geo-referencing is clunky and counter-intuitive: You have to tap a button to get Mobile FD to interface with your GPS receiver. All the other iPad EFB software I've used just see that the GPS is there and use it.

Once you've gotten Mobile FD to recognize your iPad's GPS, keep in mind that geo-referencing will be disabled when you display your flight plan. What's up with that? I found that the en route geo-referencing can get ... um ... confused. While supervising an instrument student who was flying a practice DME arc, Mobile FD had some difficulty figuring out which way the aircraft was headed. SkyCharts Pro and ForeFlight had no problem displaying the correct track.

FFM isn't confused ...

SkyCharts Pro isn't confused ...

You're headed the wrong way McFly!

Ugly, Really Ugly

If all this wasn't enough tarnish on the hallowed Jeppesen reputation, here's the capper. Jeppesen Mobile FD's latest chart release contains out-of-date charts for California. That's right. Jeppesen didn't notify me or, to my knowledge, any of their customers. I happened to discover this on my own and had to query them. The two examples I know of (there may be more) are the new RNAV approaches to Petaluma and Willows-Glenn, which replaced the old GPS approaches.

Don't Use for Navigation

Guess we wait until Sept 21?

The new RNAV approaches don't just offer LPV minima that are considerably lower, the fix names and approach courses have changed significantly. Trying to fly one of these approaches with an out-of-date chart could be a serious safety-of-flight issue.

When I emailed Jeppesen's tech support about this, the response was that these approaches would be in the next release. I asked them to verify that Jepp Mobile FD didn't contain all the current charts for California and their response was that the FAA made a large number of changes that overwhelmed Jeppesen's charting division. And for this they charge a premium price?

It's Got to Get Better

I've been a Jeppesen customer for many years, but it keeps getting harder and harder to justify the expense. Buggy software, no MacOS support, and Windows software that can make you want to tear you hair out. I want to like Jeppesen, really I do. It's just not clear that Jeppesen cares about me.

Pilot's Perspective

2011-08-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

My schedule continues to be very busy and considering the state of the economy, this is a bit perplexing. Things will undoubtedly slow down and provide time to post a few things that are in the works. Until then ...

Livermore Valley

Practice RNAV approach to Lampson

On-Shore Push

Central Valley, somewhere ...

Crossing the 29 Numbers

The Devil's Mountain

Heading down the bay, over Leslie Salt.

Near Isleton, on the RNAV 25 to Rio Vista

Somewhere near Modesto

Another view of Southbay Salt Ponds

Holding at WRAPS intersection

Still Holding at WRAPS intersection

Dumbarton Bridge, South SF Bay

Approaching Watsonville

Short final, Oakdale

Accidental self-portrait

Long Odds, Happy Endings

2011-08-12T16:34:00.000-07:00

Pilots, by and large, like to be in control and there are many ways to accomplish that goal. One way or another we have to manage risk if we're to maintain control. One way to manage risk is thoroughly planning each flight, but the best laid plans don't always pan out. Prudent pilots like to have more than one plan - the illustrious Plan B. There are folks out there who do little or no planning, just assuming that everything will be fine. Perhaps they are optimists or believe themselves to be Super Pilot, capable of handling anything than arrises. Having one or more back-up plans, just in case, is a wise choice because the unexpected is always waiting for us. It's all a matter of odds.

Rushed and Forgotten

A busy schedule recently had me instructing in seven different aircraft types in seven days. Long hours and fatigue are not good ingredients for beginning a safe flight. That crossed my mind as I was running out the door last week to head to the airport. It also crossed my mind that my minimalist flight bag felt lighter than usual. This was just a passing thought until, settling into the right seat of the aircraft in which I was about to instruct, it became obvious why my flight bag was so light. I'd left my iPad at home and so it was time for an unplanned test of my back-up strategies: Using my iPhone and the minimal selection of paper charts I keep in my flight bag.

SkyCharts Pro and ForeFlight work just fine on the iPhone, though there's no GPS to be had. That's because, being a good citizen, I put my iPhone into airplane mode before takeoff and that disables bluetooth. Not to worry because plan B was the very capable panel-mounted GPS receiver in the aircraft.

With the iPhone I can do virtually everything normally done on the iPad with the main disadvantage being the small size of the iPhone's screen. There were a few more differences: I haven't enabled multi-tasking gestures on my iPhone and some of the user interface details of ForeFlight are different from the iPad version. I appreciate a good challenge so it was time to adjust, adapt, and overcome.

Taking Notes, iPhone style

My weapon of choice for writing notes in flight is the iPad app Penultimate, but it isn't supported on the iPhone. Turns out there is a free iPhone app that offers similar features. Sure, I had to write smaller letters and use more pages, but Handwriting worked surprisingly well. There's no erase or undo. If you make a mistake, just start a new note. Did I mention it's a free app?

Back-up Paper Charts

Printing paper copies of local terminal procedures should be a part of every iPad pilot's back-up strategy. For me, nothing beats ReadyProcs, a Java-based app that runs on a bunch of different operating systems. I print out a selection of charts, in booklet format, staple them and slip them in my flight bag. No muss, no fuss.

In the unlikely event of an iPhone failure, I still have a basic complement of paper charts.

All in SloMo

Lately I've been fortunate to teach occasionally in a new, air conditioned Cirrus and the AC certainly does reduce fatigue in hot weather. Climbing out on top of a Bay Area cloud layer, I watched as my GNS 5870 bluetooth receiver came unstuck from dashboard, fell between my knees, glanced off the carpeted shroud that covers part of the AC (the evaporator unit, I think) under the right front passenger seat, before it disappeared with an odd rattle. Moving my seat back and feeling around confirmed my worst suspicion: My bluetooth GPS must have fallen through one of the numerous gaps in that shroud. It would have to be retrieved once we were back on the ground.

The interesting part was that in spite of being shielded by a fair amount of metal, the seat itself, and 175 pounds of pilot, the GNS 5870 kept satellite lock for the rest of the flight. The iPad continued to show the same ground speed and location as the G1000. Pretty remarkable ...

Back on earth, it became clear that tools would be required to retrieve the GPS. I carefully removed two bolts from the front of the AC shroud, but another fastener underneath the right seat still held the shroud in place. Uncomfortable with the idea of removing the seat, I was able to lift the front of the shroud enough to see the GNS 5870 lodged on the inboard side of the AC equipment and retrieve it. We replaced the two bolts and I intend to try leaving the GPS in my shirt pocket while flying air conditioned Cirrus aircraft!

Something New under the Sun

Pilots who rely on GPS got a wake-up call recently as increased solar flare activity began to affect GPS and WAAS signal integrity. It's important to remember that GPS, like any navigational system, has limitations. Solar activity can affect GPS signals and that's just what happened last week.

WAAS LPV availability on 8/6/2011

Things are mostly back to normal, but the Northeast and the Upper Great Lake states appear to have been most affected on the date shown. The unusual solar activity is forecast to continue. Regardless of where you live, be ready to navigate by alternate means and don't count on getting LPV minima on RNAV approaches. To access the current status of the LPV service volume (along with other cool GPS stuff), you might want to bookmark this link.

Power of ... Love

After our basenji Hunter passed away in 2008, we waited a year before deciding to get a new dog through Basenji Rescue and Transport (BRAT). We adopted a pair of tricolor basenji about 2 1/2 years ago and though it was initially challenging, it has been immensely rewarding. When Rio and Kadee (aka Taz) came to us, a lot of training and compassion were required. We were Rio's fifth home and it was clear that someone along the way had been unkind to him. He was very mistrustful of men, in particular, and easily frightened. Unwinding his fearful behavior required a lot of patience.

Kadee came to us with the name Taz and though she became comfortable in our home, she remained aloof and distant. After about a year, it occurred to me to try calling her by her original name, Kadee. The results were remarkable and if you ask me, anyone who says dogs don't have long memories is mistaken.

Here's a photo of Rio and Kadee, taken shortly after they'd come to live with us. I'd forgotten how underweight Rio was at the time - just under 20 pounds.

Here's a photo from last week. Kadee is more attentive and Rio now weighs in at a normal 24.5 pounds. In a highly competitive society, it's good to stop and remember that care, attention and love can overcome even longest of odds.

Let Your Little Light Shine

2011-08-04T23:12:00.000-07:00

Apologies to my loyal readers for the lack of updates recently. I've been super busy, but I do appreciate the emails and comments I receive each day. I do my best to respond to each and every email, but it might not be immediate and your patience is appreciated.

Brinksmanship

Everyone knows by now that after weeks of tough talk from Republicans and Democrats, the federal debt ceiling has finally increased. If you consider yourself a fiscal conservative, you may be asking questions that few others seem to be willing to address. How can any nation fight two wars for 10 years, bail out their financial industry, and not run out of money? Without additional income (read tax revenues), how could anyone expect the bills to be paid. Adherents to simplistic pledges to never raise taxes are the latest incarnation of the Flat Earth Society. Those unwilling to pay their share refuse to share the pain that every citizen in our nation has inherited. It seems everyone wants someone else to do the hard work. How's that for personal responsibility and patriotism?

Even though the debt ceiling was raised, the FAA authorization bill has been stalled. The consequences of this stalemate are obvious at my home airport: Construction on the new Oakland Metropolitan International Airport control tower has ceased. Wonder how many construction workers have been laid off by that one ...

For their part, AOPA seems to have developed multiple personalities when it comes to funding the FAA. On one hand, they don't want GA user fees to fund "bureaucracy." On the other hand, they'd like their members to believe that NextGen will be the best thing since ... the iPad. So government is bad when it costs money to operate, but government is good when in provides cool toys we like. I'm thinking my AOPA membership probably won't be renewed next year ...

Jepp Mobile FlightDeck

Speaking of toys, Jeppesen recently released a replacement for their iPad Jeppesen Mobile TC app. It has some good features, but is maddeningly incomplete, not terribly intuitive, and in some cases, offers up out-of-date data. Still, it's a big step forward for Jeppesen.

Should be simple and intuitive, right? Right?

Downloading and installing the app was simple enough. I opened the Jepp Mobile TC app I had purchased, copied the serial number, and pasted it into Mobile FlightDeck. The app didn't complain, but I saw plenty of weird behavior. For instance, entering in an origin airport and tapping on SEARCH resulted in ... no results. Odd, so I just entered a destination airport and went directly to the route field. Entering a VOR or an airway in the route field, resulted in a message saying that they didn't exist.

But I was there just yesterday!

So I did the reasonable thing and called Jeppesen tech support. While listening to what has to be the longest voicemail announcement/disclaimer/reference-to-the-support-website I've ever heard, I got the idea that I should delete the serial number from the older Jeppesen Mobile TC app and then delete the old app entirely from my iPad. That proved to be a good choice. Suddenly the features in Mobile FlightDeck started to work and it knew all about the VORs and airways that previously were non-existent. Okay ...

Mobile FlightDeck understands Victor Airways, as long as you first enter a VOR or waypoint/intersection on the airway. If you want to enter multiple airways, you have to enter the waypoint/intersection that those airways have in common.

That's better!

Let's say you're tinkering, trying to decide which route you'd like to fly between two airports. If you want to change routes, tapping on the CLEAR button above the route will ... wait for it ... clear out the route and the origin and destination airport. Geez Louise! Is anyone at Jeppesen doing usability testing?

Do a looong tap on the chart and you can access information about things like special use airspace, airports and such. Unfortunately, the information often uses a boilerplate format that needlessly repeats field names that aren't needed and simply create visual noise. Amazingly, the Jepp chart for Northern California still lists the Travis VOR. That puppy was decommissioned at least two years ago. Yikes!

Scully? Mulder?

Mobile FlightDeck provides pure electronic charts that are both flexible and useful, but they don't have the same feel as Aeronav charts. You can choose which types of navigation data you want included, but the charts still seem a bit cluttered at times. Zooming in often makes the situation better.

Complicated ...

Better ...

I plan to use Mobile FlightDeck in the air tomorrow and hope to provide some more observations afterward. For now, Jeppesen's Mobile FlightDeck app is a step in the right direction, but it needs work. Jeppesen still trails the competition and their products are still far too costly for the features offered. Sorry if that sounds blunt.

Big Changes at OAK

Contract negotiations between KasierAir and the Port of Oakland resulted in the FBO contracting in a big way. KaiserAir started as the flight department for the companies created by Henry J. Kaiser. It's been around for more than a half century and a fixture at the Oakland North Field for as long as I can remember.

The old KasierAir executive terminal now sits empty and the self-serve 100LL fuel pump was rendered inoperative. Many aircraft owners who rented tie-down space from KaiserAir were sent scrambling to find new arrangements with only a few days notice. KaiserAir still occupies the smaller executive terminal near Hangar 4, but I doubt I'll be rubbing elbows with the employees I used to see all the time. I have many memories of sitting standby in the old KaiserAir pilot lounge, getting a Caravan refueled on short notice, getting a ride to and from the South Field terminal with Tony. I always appreciated the efforts of the frontline workers at KaiserAir. Things just won't be the same ...

More to Come

I hope to continue my series on VFR flight planning and to provide observations on new products and services for pilots, but it may have to wait for crummier weather to arrive in Northern California. For now, I'm swamped with work and a full-time, freelance CFI has to make hay while the sun is shining.

Sweat the Small Stuff

2011-07-10T11:05:00.000-07:00

Papers pile up on your desk, stuff accumulates in your garage, weeds grow in your garden, and you reach a point where action must be taken. Call it cleaning house or a garage sale, nothing beats finally clearing away all the junk, reorganizing, and simplifying. Think about complexity in aviation, specifically under Instrument Flight Rules, and it's easy to see some house cleaning is in order. Needless complexity in aircraft equipment and instrument procedures has increased errors, gaffes, and worse on the part of controllers and pilots alike. Both the FAA and GA manufacturers could take simple steps to clean things up and here is a list of just a few of the needed fixes and improvements.

By Any Other Name ...

The FAA Instrument Approach Procedures Division has done a great job of creating a plethora of RNAV approaches with vertical guidance. Kudos! Now it's time to tackle a much simpler problem: Instrument approach procedure names. They have become needlessly convoluted and naming conventions are important because pilots and controllers say those names over the radio, thousands of times a day. Pilots have to look-up instrument approaches, sorting through long lists of similarly named procedures. Add to the mix similarly named approaches to parallel runways and it's obvious that selecting the wrong approach by mistake could have serious repercussions.

Controllers and pilots can often be heard saying something like "Cleared RNAV GPS 32 approach" when it should be simply "Cleared RNAV 32 approach." Many pilots and controllers apparently don't realize that approach title items that appear in parenthesis are not to be used when referring to the approach. Who came up with that convention? Bet it wasn't a pilot or a controller.

Complicated, dumb naming conventions add no value, but they do create confusion and extra workload for all concerned. Consider this subset of the RNAV approaches at my home airport:

KOAK RNAV (GPS) Y RWY 27R
KOAK RNAV (RNP) Z RWY 27R
KOAK RNAV (GPS) Y RWY 27L
KOAK RNAV (RNP) Z RWY 27L

How about a naming scheme where RNAV would refer to approaches for use with appropriate area navigation or GPS, RNP would refer to approaches with curved paths reserved for authorized aircraft and aircrew (i.e. not most GA aircraft)? And lose the stuff in parenthesis fer cryin' out loud! The list of KOAK approaches would then read as follows:

KOAK RNAV RWY 27R
KOAK RNAV RWY 27L
KOAK RNP RWY 27L
KOAK RNP RWY 27R

That would make it easier (and safer) for everyone, now wouldn't it?

Smart Vectors-To-Final

Adhering to crossing restrictions at step-down fixes leading to an ILS is important because early interception of the glideslope does not necessarily guarantee compliance with altitude crossing restrictions outside the final approach fix (FAF). This is where Garmin's implementation of Vectors-To-Final (VTF) for instrument approaches comes under scrutiny.

Let's see, 5 plus 2.3 plus 2 = ...

Since the late 1990s, when the 430/530 units were first introduced, activating an approach with VTF has remained virtually unchanged. VTF causes any step-down fixes outside the FAF to disappear, the current waypoint becomes the FAF, and the only distance displayed is the distance to the FAF. To locate step-down fixes before the FAF, the pilot must perform some interesting mental math. This is particularly vexing because when a pilot hears a controller say "fly heading 210, vectors ILS 27 right" and they see an option named "Vectors-to-final," they naturally assume that's the option to choose. The standard operating procedure is actually to never use VTF on approaches with step-down fixes outside the FAF, even if the controller says "vectors RNAV 28 left approach."

The vectors-to-final option should result in the GPS receiver figuring out where the aircraft has intercepted the approach course and all fixes outside the FAF should be depicted. If the current behavior is required by the relevant Technical Standard Order (TSO), then Garmin and the FAA need to work to change those TSOs. Touch screens interfaces on GPS receivers are great, but pilots have been waiting for a fix for VTF behavior for over a decade. This isn't rocket science.

Alternate Airports

With the exception of the discontinued CNX 80, Garmin GPS receivers do not provide the ability to define an alternate airport as part of a programmed flight plan. In fact, the flight plan behavior of the Garmin units is so convoluted that it would take an entire blog post to describe the work-arounds pilots have to do when navigating to their alternate after a missed approach. Pilots don't need increased workload during critical phases of flight. Hello? Garmin?

Required Equipment

When pilots and instructors sit around the hangar and debate the possible reasons why ADF is required on an approach, something is wrong. An instrument approach needs to be clear so that it can be accurately flown. In the evolving world of RNAV, the convention of encoding the equipment required for an approach in the procedure name is quickly breaking down. So here's some heresy: The design details that require certain equipment for an approach should be opaque to pilots.

Pilots don't need to know why, we just need to know what. The FAA needs to list the required equipment (along with other restrictions) on the plan view, in plain view, and in a font big enough that pilots can read. Pilots shouldn't have to theorize what stuff they need in the panel to legally fly a particular approach.

User-defined Holding Patterns

The CNX 80 allowed the pilot to program an ad hoc holding pattern and then allowed the GPS and autopilot to fly that holding pattern. The CNX80 has been discontinued and follow-on models still don't seem to have the user-defined hold feature. It's great that Garmin is working on voice-controlled avionics, but user-defined holding patterns is a basic feature that's still missing. Again beating up on Garmin, but they make it so easy.

PT Required or No PT?

A decade ago it appeared RNAV approaches would all be designed with Terminal Arrival Areas (TAA) that would simplify the delivery of approach clearances, reduce workload on controllers, and allow pilots to navigate on their own using RNAV. While some older RNAV approaches do provide minimum safe altitude information by TAA sectors and explicitly include the No PT notation for entire TAA sectors, the TAA seems to have fallen out of favor and isn't included in many of the new RNAV approaches. Perhaps this is a cost-saving maneuver, but it sets up a bad situation with regard to procedure turns.

You were just cleared direct to an Initial Approach Fix on an RNAV approach with a 30 degree intercept to the approach course, but you're not on a transition that tells you the Hold-In-Lieu-of-Procedure turn is not required (NoPT). If the controller doesn't say "Cleared straight in RNAV ..." you're expected to fly once around the hold. Of course if the controller simply forgot to specify "straight in" and you fly the hold, you'll probably get yelled at or worse (cf. Limitation on Procedure Turns). The best advice for pilots in the situation is to query the controller if they don't get a straight-in clearance.

Perhaps depicting MSA sectors is not feasible for technical reasons, still the FAA should find a way to clearly specify when a procedure turn on an approach is required and when it isn't.

Which Weather?

Approach procedures into some non-towered airports specify that you should use the surface weather for a nearby airport. In the current age of electronic information, why can't the FAA (and by extension, Jeppesen) include the frequency for that airport's surface weather? This sort of simple cross-referencing is what computers are good at.

Digital Charts

The days of individual paper chart purchases are quickly fading and the production of these charts needs to be modernized. VFR and IFR charts need to be produced in a way that allows seamless electronic display. Many EFB users may not realize it, but there is significant effort going on behind the scenes to stitch together these charts for EFB display. And while we're at it, geo-referencing on instrument approach charts should not require significant third-party effort and cost to provide. The times they are a changin' and the Aeronav folks have been working hard to keep up with those changes. Let's hope their chart products continue to be modernized.

Jeppesen has had over a year to get their digital chart act together for the iPad, but geo-referenced en route and approach charts are still missing in action. One assumes that once these features are finally available, they still will cost you your other arm and/or leg.

Digital Documents

Cessna/Textron has probably made more training aircraft than any other manufacturer in history, but you can't get PDFs of their pilot information manuals. Diamond, Cirrus, and even Garmin provide important documents for download as PDFs. Given the rapid acceptance of electronic tablets like the iPad, Cessna needs to get with the program.

And speaking of Cessna, ever try to figure out if your aircraft's Approved Flight Manual and all of its supplements are up to date? Good luck to you because it's a nightmare!

Anyone Listening?

You may have ideas for simple fixes that would result in big payoffs for little investment, but you may ask "What's the use? Is anyone in a position to make the changes actually paying attention?" Before glossing over the idea that seemingly trivial improvements really can have a tremendous impact on any system, take a few minutes to watch Rory Sutherland's TED talk on the subject. The important points are toward the end, but it may just change the way you look at small stuff.

Weird Summer So Far

2011-07-03T21:43:00.000-07:00

Diablo Practice Area. 28˚C at 3000 feet

Sizzling Night in Oaktown

Still 27˚C at Sunset

A few days later, rain and broken clouds ...

Odd Wx for the end of June in N. Ca

At least there's no ice ...

2 Days Later, Hot and Clear

A new ... Perspective

Micro-climates in action

Near Bolinas

Ft. Baker ... Golden Gate Bridge in there somewhere

Hot Evening in San Fran

More Micro-climates

Then today ... Walkies? Nah, it's too hot dad!

Pocket Protector Optional

2011-06-28T22:16:00.000-07:00

A calculus professor once told me the only tools a real mathematician needs are a pen, a piece of paper the size of a postage stamp, and his or her brain. That may be the case if one is sitting at a desk, quietly contemplating the theoretical. Controlling an aircraft that is hurtling through the air at two miles per minute or more while simultaneously listening and talking on the radio? That endeavor has the unfortunate side effect of dropping everyone's IQ by several points, which is why pilots have adopted a few tools to help them deal with the flying world's challenging mix of theoretical and practical. One such tool is the E6B calculator.

For older, traditionalist pilots, the E6B is synonymous with "slide rule" and the mere mention of electronic E6B calculators and smartphone apps will get them on their soapbox in a heartbeat, praising the slide rule and preaching against the dangers of new-fangled electronic contraptions. Young upstart pilots, having likely never used a slide rule, may find this attachment a bit odd. Frankly I do too. But even as electronic E6Bs are becoming widespread, there is still a place for the old fashioned E6B slide rule.

Tried and True

The advantages of the E6B slide rule are many: It requires no batteries, it does a variety of calculations, and it is relatively lightweight. The "front" side of the E6B can accomplish a dizzying array of calculations and conversions: Ground speed, distance, time, fuel consumption, endurance, knots to nautical mile - provided the user has been properly initiated. The back side of the E6B, sometimes called the "wind side," is used to calculate wind correction angles and determine winds aloft.

The disadvantage of any slide rule is that in order to use it, the user must provide most of the problem-solving context. In a high-workload environment, user-supplied context is less than ideal. If you don't understand how to arrange the slide rule scales to solve your problem, you won't get very far. Even after you have a grasp on the slide rule basics, you must still use common sense to ensure that your answer is not off by an order of magnitude.

Some might argue that having to provide this sort of context and judgement is the very thing that ensures an understanding level of knowledge about the calculations be performed. That rings hollow to me because in flight what is most desirable is speed and accuracy. It's possible to go through the motions of slide rule calculations, mimicking what you've seen, arrive at an answer (correct or incorrect), and still not understand how you got there. Yet for kinesthetic and tactile learners, the E6B is an ideal tool, probably more so than an electronic calculator. Instructors who are unsure of their student's learning strengths can always have them take one of the many learning style inventory tests available on-line.

In spite of its apparent simplicity, the slide rule E6B is by no means foolproof. Tiny screws hold the main section together. With age, these screws can come loose and if that happens in flight, you'll have an interesting project on your hands. The wind side has a transparent plastic disk that is meant to be marked with a pencil, but that plastic can become cloudy, brittle, and riddled with marks. APR Industries has developed an innovative E6B design that uses a rotating windspeed cursor arm on the wind side so that you don't have to make any pencil marks. Who says you can't teach old dogs new tricks?

If you are up for a challenge, grab the E6B of your choice and try tackling one of the Safety and Flight Evaluation Conference (SAFECON) Practice Exams.

Flashy and New

There seems to be a endless supply of E6B apps out there for smart phones like the iPhone and the Android. At last count there were over 30 E6B apps at the iTunes store, some included as a feature inside an app. Perhaps creating E6B apps is a rite of passage, like writing your first "Hello world" program.

My favorite iPhone/iPad E6B app continues to be PFMA since it has a very simple, shallow menu structure. You provide the information you know and PFMA provides the missing information. No need to first locate the type of problem you're trying to solve in a complex and multi-layered menu structure. There are a few conversions that PFMA doesn't do and some obscure calculations that are missing, but it's easy to use in flight and a very good deal at $5.99.

For those of you wondering, that other calculator is an ancient HP-16C Computer Scientist that still works flawlessly. What can I say? I love RNP calculators and you never know when you might need to calculate the 2's compliment of a binary number.

Regardless which E6B app you choose, remember you won't be allowed to take your smartphone or other multi-purpose electronic device into an FAA knowledge test session. Hmm ... Maybe there's life in that old E6B after all. Or purchase one of the dedicated E6B electronic calculators like the ones sold by Sporty's. I still have one of the Sporty's models, though the LCD display has long since given up the ghost.

Required Knowledge?

Like sailors before them, aeronautical navigators aboard airliners of yore used a sextant to plot their position. Thinking about this got me wanting to learn something about celestial navigation, even though it has been supplanted by satellite-based navigation. So in my spare time, I'll be working on building my own (very simple) sextant. When completed, I plan to try plotting my position in a few locations on the ground and compare the results to a handheld GPS or Google Maps on my iPhone. This project is for my own amusement and just because I find it interesting doesn't mean I'll soon be requiring my students to build their own sextants.

Ron wrote a cogent rejoinder to my post about digital versus paper charts, pointing out that most any pilot can blindly follow a magenta line into oblivion if they have lost (or perhaps never learned) basic flight planning and navigation skills. Many instructors might see that lack of skill and interpret it to mean that the pilot needs more training, but a deeper question seems to emerge: "What knowledge should the FAA (and, by extension, DPEs and CFIs) require pilots to demonstrate in the first place?" I believe the answer lies in thoughtfully combining the use of hand calculations, slide rule and electronic E6Bs, paper and digital charts, and paper navigation logs with computerized flight planning.

Tradition versus Progress

There's a undeniable pride student pilots feel once they have mastered basic calculations with an E6B. That's understandable because acquiring slide rule prowess is like learning a magic trick. Your friends are bound to be impressed, especially if the E6B you use is contained on the face of a flashy pilot watch. Pushing buttons on a calculator? Anyone can do that! For my part, I'll continue to teach my students how to use paper charts and a slide rule E6B, but I also won't discourage them from embracing new technology. I never tire of hearing students marvel "So pilots really used to fly this way?"

Pilot's View

2011-06-12T12:38:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy few weeks with little time to write, but here are some recent photos ...

Getting to KSNS VFR required a climb to 9,500 feet. Odd June Wx!

Missed approach at KSTS

Darn that dream!

Base to final, East of Eden

Strange weather for late May ...

New KOAK tower, under construction

Another view of the odd "summer" Wx

Air ambulance on the ramp - gear collapsed after landing - ouch!

Sunset on the KPAO ramp

Something you don't see everyday on the KOAK North Field!

Maintaining VFR, near Mt. Hamilton

Another Bay Area Sunset

Is Cross-Country Flight Planning Passé?

2011-06-06T12:02:00.000-07:00

The widespread availability of sophisticated GPS receivers, digitized aviation charts, and internet-based weather information is changing the way student pilots are learning cross-country flight planning. The introduction of new technology and techniques always raises questions: Should student pilots be taught to use paper charts, plotter, pencil, and a slide rule E6B or encouraged to switch entirely to electronic charts, calculators, GPS and computer-based weather briefings? Don’t throw out that plotter and slide rule just yet because the best approach to learning the complicated process of cross-country flight planning involves combining old school with waay cool. Here’s the first installment of a multi-part series on the revolution in VFR cross-country flight planning, written with student pilots and their instructors in mind.

Drawing the Line

One of the first steps in cross-country flight planning is to get a rough idea about the general direction and the distance involved. With a current paper chart, just plop your plotter down and draw a course line between your departure and destination airports with a pencil. Sounds easy enough until you need to plan a route that begins on one side of the chart and continues on the other side, which actually provides a good scenario for comparing paper and digital charts.

FAA VFR charts include instructions for extending a course line from one side of a chart to the other using a pencil and a spare sheet of paper, but it's a Catch 22: You determine the magnetic course by drawing a line between the two points, but you can’t draw the course line because the points are on opposite sides of the chart.

One solution is to purchase a World Aeronautical Chart (WAC), which covers a larger geographic area at a scale of 1 to 1,000,000 as opposed to the sectional chart scale of 1 to 500,000. Good luck finding a WAC anywhere but on-line. One could purchase two versions of the same sectional and piece them together, being careful to account for the 2 minutes of longitudinal overlap on each side. You could cut the Gordian Knot by using Victor airways or choosing a landmark that appears within the overlap on each side of the chart. Or you could use your current chart and an expired chart that you just happened to have saved, just don’t mix them up!

Or simply combine paper with plastic: Use a handheld GPS or any of a variety of web sites to determine the magnetic course between the two airports, then use your pencil and plotter to replicate that course. Which approach is best? That's really up to the pilot. The goal in teaching student pilots is not to preserve hallowed aviation traditions for their own sake. Whether a student is using paper or plastic or a combination of the two, the goal is for them to understand what they're doing and why they're doing it. Using a combinational approach with old and new products may actually end up teaching the student to a correlative level of knowledge.

Digitized charts provide a big, mostly seamless chart and you'd think that would make plotting a course line on a digitized chart easier, but plotting a digital course line can be less flexible and more abstract than doing it by hand with pencil and paper. EFB apps like Skycharts Pro and ForeFlight Mobile as well as online planners like FltPlan or FlightAware will draw a course line representation, but your choice of waypoints may be limited to the VFR reporting points, intersections, navigation aids, and airports contained in the application’s navigation database. Some products allow you to define your own waypoints using lat/long, but that's not terribly convenient.

VFR Sectional and Course line using FltPlan.com

Doing the Coursework

With the course drawn on a paper chart, you use your plotter to measure the true course, locate the nearest isogonic line and apply the magnetic variation shown (subtract Easterly variations, add Westerly variations) to determine the magnetic course. If your destination or departure airport has a VOR on the field, get the magnetic course from the compass rose surrounding that VOR. Either way, with a bit of care and attention will provide the magnetic course on a paper chart within ±1˚, though simple arithmetic errors can result if you’re in a rush.

Old school pilots and instructors rightly claim that never drawing a course line on a paper chart can rob student pilots of an important learning experience about Magnetic declination. Yet with the right input data, computers tend to do a faster and more accurate job with arithmetic and geometry than humans: Waypoints entered, the digital course line drawn, determining the magnetic course is a foregone conclusion. A good approach for student pilots is to plan first on paper, then check your results using a digital source.

Go the Distance

Plotters offer a variety of scales and if you mistakenly measure using the wrong scale ... you won’t be the first pilot to do so. So look carefully, choose the correct scale for your chart and line up the correct marks.

Getting the distance on a digitized chart is a forgone conclusion, but errors are still possible. You can enter the wrong waypoint or misspell the waypoint. One tipoff is a digital course line that makes a sudden, severe turn off the edge of the map you're viewing.

If the digital product you are using provides recently assigned ATC routes, remember that these are instrument flight rules (IFR) clearances and these routes may involve altitude requirements that are beyond capability of the average GA aircraft. If you will be flying IFR, remember that there may not be any recently assigned ATC routes for the departure and destination airport that you have chosen.

Some EFB apps are better than others at drawing a course line that is visible, yet doesn't obscure important information.

FFM course line obscures airway radial

SCP course line is more ... subtle

Overcoming Obstacles

With a preliminary course line drawn, consider the appropriate altitudes one could fly. You'd think that pilots would know and apply the hemispheric rule, but it's surprising how many pilots (intentionally or unintentionally) fly WAFDOF (wrong altitude for direction of flight). Whether you remember "Odd birds fly East" or simply refer to the diagram etched into many kneeboards, do other pilots a favor: Fly the correct altitude for your magnetic course.

Minimum elevation figures are shown on VFR charts and these provide the lowest altitude that will clear the highest charted obstacle within a specific quadrangle by 300 to 400 feet. Depending on how close your route is to that highest obstruction, flying at or just above that altitude may be the safe thing to do or it may be hopelessly foolhardy. I don't know of any app that will make the assessment of a safe altitude for you: You're going to have to use your little gray cells.

Whether you are using paper or digital charts, a nifty course line that goes to your destination won't necessarily keep you clear of special use airspace. One cool feature in SkyCharts Pro is the ability to get information on special use airspace by tapping. Locate the red circle next to an MOA, prohibited, or restricted area and tap twice to get the effective times, altitudes and the frequency of the controlling agency.

ForeFlight offers a similar feature, but it requires more taps to get the same information. ForeFlight does offer a quick way to create or change course lines by tapping and dragging.

Acquire, Combine, Conquer

Paper chart adherents often claim that paper is foolproof because paper charts don’t require batteries, they can be folded and handled, and are less intimidating to pilots who may be less computer savvy. True, but paper charts have some serious disadvantages: They can be torn, damaged, lost, or hopelessly riddled with marks from previous flight planning efforts. Last, but not least, all paper charts eventually expire and become obsolete.

Even before the FAA changed the structure for chart retailers, it was often difficult to get a paper chart unless you planned ahead. With a reduced number of chart retailers, your odds of acquiring a current paper chart at the last minute from a local retailer is tantamount to winning the lottery. A chart subscription is obviously the best bet, but that’s not much help if you’re away from home on a longer trip, need an oddball chart, or you lost your chart a week before it was set to expire.

The chart retailers who remain have to deal with unsold, expired paper charts. Charts have to be printed and physically shipped which adds to the cost and carbon-loading. Old school pilots are familiar with the various paper chart subscription services available through Aeronav or a variety of on-line retailers, but they may not be up-to-speed on the various options for digital charts.

Digitized charts, whether viewed on-line or on an iPad, tablet, laptop or desktop computer can be acquired at a lower cost (some are available on-line for free), they are easy to update, and they can cover large geographic areas without folding, flipping, or ripping. There’s no physical shipping required and no paper to recycle. The disadvantages of electronic charts basically boil down to all the possible failures to which electronic devices are heir to, including screen readability in bright light, software/hardware failures, and drained batteries. There are also some problems with how digitized charts are stitched together, but that really just reflects the limitations with how the FAA generates the charts. Hopefully that process will continue to be modernized and soon we'll see seamless VFR and IFR charts become a reality.

FAA VFR charts can be downloaded to your computer as raster files for free, and a simple, free, and platform-independent solution for viewing them is Google Earth. Follow the instructions in this WikiHowTo and overlay sectionals and terminal area charts in Google Earth. While this approach has limitations, it does offer pilots the ability to view charts for large geographic areas at little or no cost. You can even do some rudimentary flight planning activities, like determining the course and distance between airports.

Several products are available for the iPad that allow you to access VFR charts, including ForeFlight and Skycharts. The cost of these products varies from $20 per year to $80 per year or more. Like all cockpit resource management issues, one size does not fit all. Both of these apps allow you to create flight plans that will draw course lines on the digital charts and give you magnetic courses, but old school paper chart planning provides more flexibility and, dare I say it, precision.

If you are a Mac user, MacGPS Pro provides another option for importing FAA raster charts. MacGPS Pro lets you define user waypoints, integrate with an external GPS receiver, and measure distances and courses. Similar solutions probably exist for the Windows world, but not being a Windows user, well ...

Paper and Plastic

After a student pilot has been through the flight planning process a half dozen times using paper charts, it's not clear that any more learning is likely to take place by restricting them to old school planning. While I do believe that a students' primary experience should involve pencil, plotter, and paper chart, that doesn't mean they should be discouraged from branching out to the high-tech solutions once they understand flight planning basics. Looking at the strengths and weaknesses of paper and digitized charts it’s easy to conclude that the best approach is to understand and use both. Having a paper back-up strategy in flight is the prudent advice offered by the FAA’s AC on Electronic Flight Bags.

Some pilots may still resist using digitized charts for the understandable reason that they simply prefer holding a chart in their hands. Nothing wrong with that, but charting and flight planning is changing. Time waits for no one, not even old school pilots, so don't be afraid to explore and experiment.

In future installments, I'll discuss how technology is changing calculators, navigation log preparation, and in-flight diversions.

Cover Your Tail

2011-06-03T07:57:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, my student was refueling the Cessna we had just flown as I turned to appreciate an old 737 converted to a business jet that was parked in the hot spot behind us. Intrigued by the classic lines and the "cigar tube" engines, I pulled out my camera to take a few digital photographs and that simple act started an odd chain of events that strikes at the heart of the recent debate on privacy, public access, and blocking access to flight plan data.

Expectation of Privacy

One doesn't need to be a lawyer or privacy expert to be aware that the concept of "expectation of privacy" seems to be fluid. Anyone who thinks that the constitution guarantees a right to privacy has not been paying attention. Exactly how we should interpret the various amendments in the Bill of Rights that appear to involve privacy depends on who you talk to. Clearly James Madison had no idea that evolving technology would provide so many opportunities to create the surveillance society we currently have. Virtually all voice and data communications can be captured and mined in an unprecedented wave of domestic surveillance. Concerns that wiretapping capabilities have been used without a court order or judicial oversight continue to be debated.

Public or Private

When I started to photograph that classic 737, I was immediately approached by a ramp worker who told me to stop. Nonplussed, I asked him what he was talking about. He explained that their clients didn't want their privacy invaded by having their aircraft photographed. I countered that I was standing on the ramp of a public use airport that was built with taxpayer money. He changed tack and said that it was the FBO's policy that photographs were not allowed. These sorts of claims to privacy in public spaces seem to be promulgated primarily by wealthy individuals and celebrities who are presumably worried about security and safety. Just to be clear, I'm not trying to start a class war. That war has already been fought and, as others have pointed out, the Middle Class lost.

The fact that aircraft flight tracking data was widely available came to the fore when that data was used to uncover extraordinary rendition flights where suspected terrorists were transported to other countries where certain rights and freedoms are not guaranteed. In several cases, the people transported were found to not be involved in terrorism after they experienced considerable ... ahem ... inconvenience. With the flight tracking cat out of the bag, the FAA eventually developed the Block Aircraft Registration Request (BARR) program where aircraft owners and operators could block access to the tracking of their aircraft.

In March, Secretary of Transportation LaHood announced the decision to no longer block aircraft tail numbers (with the exception of military aircraft and others who can prove valid security concerns), thereby providing general access to National Airspace System Status Information data. This effectively dismantles the previous arrangement provided by BARR where aircraft owners and operators could block access to the tracking of their aircraft.

Say Cheese

Arguments for privacy rights typically hinge around preventing unwarranted government intrusion, but those who claim that their privacy is being invaded by access to flight tracking data don't seem to be worried about the government. They seem concerned about the general public and what little remains of the Fourth Estate knowing what they are doing. Given all that has transpired, it would seem that AOPA and the NBAA are a little late to the party when it comes privacy rights. The lines between private and public spaces as well as individual versus corporate rights continue to be redefined. So some simple advice: If you have a classic B737 and you don't want anyone to photograph it or know its location, park it in your backyard, throw a tarp over it, and hope for the best.

Aviation Mentor

New Year, New Photos

3DBB

Top 10 GA Stories of 2011

LogTen Pro, Version 6

Holiday Wishes

Early Christmas

Jepp, Aeronav and You

Week off

iPad EFB Gotchas

Driver's License = Medical Certificate?

Diversion, Conversion

Five Reason to NOT upgrade to iOS 5

iOS 5 ... Debacle

Move Toward the Light

Go For the Burn(out)

Captain Snarky

Pilot's Perspective

Long Odds, Happy Endings

Let Your Little Light Shine

Sweat the Small Stuff

Weird Summer So Far

Pocket Protector Optional

Pilot's View

Is Cross-Country Flight Planning Passé?

Cover Your Tail