Comments on: Night and day: two perspectives on a small airport

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 05:27:57 +0000

I read your story here about moving to the smaller airport with interest. I find it most interesting of course that you are starting to realize the value that comes with the larger facility, and that the price you were paying before the NavCan price increases was likely a unrealized bargain. Things like lighting, instrument approaches, ATC, facilities, and all the like. They are the modern conveniences that make things easier.

However, getting to go fly by yourself, without restriction, atc over your shoulder, well…

Good luck which ever way you decide to go.

By: smurfjet

smurfjet — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 17:45:37 +0000

I share your impression about YRO as well. Dark, alien place, with extra terrestrials (ok ok, maybe not that bad, but they’re weird).

At least there is the museum. You’d think it would be more friendly because of that.

I got here looking for METAR RSS feeds, you know of any?

By: Flyin Dutchman

Flyin Dutchman — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 22:44:28 +0000

That works to :) Its probably easier for a turbo prop to chop and drop because when we select ground idle in the air it drops like brick. We tried the other day to see how steep we could come down. 10,000 5 mile final and still had to add power to make it. PC12 is approved for a maximum 8 degree ILS though which is pretty neat. I had to look into the supplement pages for that and it even is certified to have a pilot relief drain….under the limitations I believe it says you have to be male :) Too funny

Safe flying.

By: Jim Black

Jim Black — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 15:45:33 +0000

Im glad you made it

By: david

david — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 17:58:53 +0000

Thanks for the hint. With a smaller plane, my rule on night cross-countries has always been simply to hold circuit altitude (assuming no high terrain or obstacles) until I’m within less than 1 nm of the threshold, and then simply chop and drop. I know that wouldn’t work well on a bigger, higher-performance plane, though, and I should probably start practicing your technique.

By: Flyin Dutchman

Flyin Dutchman — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 03:51:54 +0000

Hey Dave

What we used to do flying into crappily lit reserves at night (black hole effect pretty much everywhere we went) we went off the GPS distance and cross refrenced it with our altitude. Since it works like a hot damn for single runways where the geographic refrence point is the center of the airport, so you get your distance from the center as well you can OBS the runway centerline and track it like a localizer. Basically if the runway is 3000 feet long we would just add .3 nm to our distance for the refrence on the way down to figure out where we needed to be altitude wise.

IE.
Based on a 3000 foot runway…
We would set ourselves up about 4 miles back at 1000 feet AGL (provided there was no significant terrain around)and for us would have the flap out to approach and then throw down the gear. at 3.3 on the GPS (off the airport) we would leave 1000 agl and start out decent for the field. Now the rule of thumb is half your ground speed and add a zero would give you a rough rate of descent required to maintain a 3 degree slope. So for us at 120 600 fpm would work and we would cross refrence every mile…..2.3 miles back 600 feet, 1.3 back 300 feet etc…and if the trend was being high or low correct it. You are the math guy so you can explain it all a little better but it has always worked for the lay folk like me. Only a few airports had vasi or papis so this is what we used most of the time.

Cheers

Safe flying out there !