Land and Hold Short

Land and Hold Short has just moved from a hacked-up homemade system to WordPress, an excellent Open Source weblog manager. The new system has search, trackbacks, pingbacks, user comments, and many other features, so it should make reading the blog a lot more fun. I’ve done some .htaccess work to make sure that old permalinks keep working: please leave a comment if you find anything that’s not working or if you have any configuration suggestions. I’ll work on coming up with a custom theme later — just moving the old postings over was enough work for one Saturday afternoon. I’d also be grateful for category suggestions.

Note, too, that all old posts are (at the time of writing) commentless, because user comments were not possible until today.

I just received my January copy of the so-so IFR Refresher, and I came to an article “Choosing Wisely” about picking IFR alternates. IFR flying, I think, is 20% about flying and navigating the plane on instruments and 80% about memorizing obscure rules, and the IFR alternate airport rules (for choosing an alternative airport in advance, in case weather keeps you out of your destination) illustrate that point nicely. They also show some of the differences between flying in Canada and the US — I will admit to flying in the US without really knowing all of their alternate rules, and I’m sure that my fellow pilots from the US have done the same in Canada.

In Canada, if you file IFR, you have to file an alternate. Period. It doesn’t matter if every airport within 500 miles of your route is forecast to have blue skies and 50 mile visibility for the next week. In the US, sometimes you have to file an alternate and sometimes you don’t. In the US, a pilot can skip filing an IFR alternate if

1. the destination airport has an instrument approach; and
2. the forecast ceiling at the destination is at least 2,000 feet and the forecast visibility is at least three statue miles from one hour before to one hour after the ETA.

But wait, that applies only if you’re a US Part 91 operator. If you’re a US Part 135 operator, the ceiling requirement is different: you have to add 1,500 feet to the lowest circling minimum altitude, or if none is available, to the lowest straight-in minimum altitude, then round up to at least 2,000 feet.

Is there any benefit to this extra complexity? The main problem with alternates is fuel: in both Canada and the US, you have to carry enough fuel IFR to fly to your destination, do a missed approach, fly to your alternate, do a missed approach, and then fly 45 minutes more. In a small plane with, say, a 600 nm range, you’re not going to be able to fly too far if your closest usable alternate is 200 nm from your destination. Not filing an alternate lets you file IFR and land with a smaller fuel reserve.

If the weather is bad, though, you may still need to pick a far-away alternate to get into a different weather system, so you’re back to the fuel problem. If the weather is good at your destination, then you can just pick an alternate airport nearby (my usual good-weather IFR alternate is Gatineau [CYND], a few minutes from my home airport, Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier [CYOW]). In the end, then, I think this benefit is more imaginary than real. I’ll just stick with always including an alternate in my IFR flight plan, in Canada or the US.

There are many other finicky differences between the Canadian and US alternate rules, but those can wait for a future posting.