Against the Current

When you don't fly professionally (or, worse, when you don't have a medical certificate) it's important to take advantage of every opportunity. Looking at this morning's forecast of nothing better than 600 overcast, I figured that today would provide none. So I cheerfully went to class, then across campus to lunch, talking with a visitor from Spain. I couldn't help but notice that the university weather was a lot better than 600 overcast, but sometimes the city is in the clear while the airport is in the soup, so I once again dismissed the thought that kept interfering with what should have been my mathematical frame of mind. I settled into my office chair. I couldn't help myself: I logged onto DUATS and got a weather briefing. "Just for practice," I told myself, "just for practice."

Maybe practice makes perfect: the metar was KPIH 092353Z 03007KT 10SM SCT048 00/M06 A2998. How much research did I need to get done this afternoon, anyway? Hadn't I put two new theorems in my notebook just yesterday?

But it's not so simple when you don't have a medical certificate. I started phoning pilots. Greg was already at the airport and ready to fly. It's time to fly!

Greg and I have flown a lot together (I instructed him for his CFI), so settled into our personal patterns easily. One thing about flying with Greg keeps me at the top of my game. Greg used to be a controller. When there's traffic, he sees it before anyone. Better yet, he knows how to point it out, so when he says "There he is, 3 o'clock, down low," you look and find it right away, too.

And there was lots of traffic on this pretty afternoon. We went to Blackfoot for a touch-and-go, departing just as a flight of three high-wing taildraggers arrived, about 200 feet in trail from each other. Someone kept calling them "party of three" on the radio, as if it were a restaurant.

Heading home, the Worst Controller I Know was working the tower. "Uh-oh," we said, almost simultaneously, "this should be interesting." I wanted to fly a practice ILS, but there was another airplane already on the approach. Well, it was not exactly on the approach, it was outbound to the marker. So maybe Mike (it's a small town, we know who's flying what) was 6 miles from the marker, outbound, while we were 6 miles from the marker, inbound. By the time Mike got there and started outbound for the procedure turn we would be in the hangar. Somebody was swimming against the current, and it wasn't Mike, and it wasn't me.

But the controller didn't see it that way. So I did a 360 (under the hood), and when I rolled out there went the outbound 182, 1000' above us, headed away from the airport.

Somehow I got the controller to see that we were in front of the 182, where we had been all along, so we did the approach. The controller kept micromanaging, though, and his frequent irrelevant radio calls threw me a dot off. Grrrr. Greg was laughing loudly, but was also careful not to key the mic while he did so.


Done with the ILS, we were in closed traffic. A Falcon called, on the GPS approach. "This ought to be fun," Greg said, and I agreed. Four VFR airplanes was over this controller's personal minimums. I thought about calling the tower chief on his cell phone...

The frequency was busy and The Controller kept changing his mind about the landing sequence. I didn't help. He put us ahead of Mike in the 182, but I knew Mike needed to do a circling approach, so I volunteered to extend my downwind to let Mike finish. But meantime the Falcon was arriving, probably indicating 170 or so.

"There he is," Greg said, and sure enough I followed his eye to the Falcon. The eyesight pressure was on.

"Looks like a 900," I said.

"Yeah, beautiful airplane," he said, not missing a beat. Of course he was right.

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So I didn't just get to fly. I got to be bury, mixing it up with The Controller and watching my spacing from other traffic and even avoiding a bird strike. the kind of flying that keeps you sharp. I hope. At the end of all this, I was surprised to note that I am instrument current until the end of March. Without a medical certificate it won't do much good, of course, but it will be nice to be ready.

Class B with a grain of Salt

Salt Lake City approach and its Class B procedures continue to leave me scratching my head. Continues? See Class B Silliness from back in April. And for years they have been annoying turbine pilots by using an unpublished north departure gate, the Wasatch VOR 005 radial at 60 nautical miles. Locals learn to expect this and to carry a little extra fuel (it adds 15 miles to a flight to Pocatello, for example), but transients are left scratching their heads and reprogramming the FMS while Mr. Big Shot and his trophy wife fume at the delay.

They're still slow to give Class B clearances. Sometimes they'll say "Expect Class B clearance from the next controller," but the legal status of "expect" isn't clear to me, especially when flying under Visual Flight Rules (VFR). Under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) the situation is different: according to 14CFR91.185, the route or altitude that ATC has told a pilot to "expect" becomes the clearance in the event of lost communications. So, approaching Idaho Falls on a busy IFR day one often hears "Proceed direct Idaho Falls VOR, expect ILS runway 20 approach." If you reach IDA and the frequency has been too busy for center to give you a new clearance (lack of bandwidth is a form of lost communications) you just go ahead and do the approach.


But a VFR approaching KSLC is not an IFR, and a clearance is not a route. Do they think that the "expect" will allow me to enter Class B in the event of frequency congestion? I just don't know. We end up circling in the little notch between the Wasatch Front and the Class B boundary, above the Ogden Class D.

The next annoyance is their use of an unpublished frequency for the tower. General Aviation usually uses the east runway (17 - 35); the tower frequency is published as 118.3 mHz. But now the final handoff from Approach is "Contact Salt Lake Tower on 120.2." This isn't a big deal on arrival, when you are going through a bunch of frequency changes, but departure is different. Before flying in the Class B airspace you need a clearance, and the Clearance Delivery position has helpfully given you a departure frequency along with a transponder code. When my students are ready, I have them switch to tower frequency, then set the departure frequency as the standby frequency, and only then call "Ready."


But now Salt Lake Tower hands departures off to 120.2, rather than the departure frequency that we have been told to expect. So the student, already stressed, does a bunch of knob twisting while trying to stay straight and stay under the altitude restriction. It would be easier if Clearance Delivery said "Departure with Tower on 120.2."

Leaving Class B, we hear "...leaving Class B airspace, frequency change approved, have a nice flight." What happened to "squawk VFR?" I am 100% sure that they do not want us on the same transponder code; they recycle them pretty quickly. So again we have to ask and the frequency is tied up more than necessary and somebody doesn't get their clearance or flies through a localizer due to lack of bandwidth.

And it's not our fault.

How Far Can You Go?

I did a couple of trips last week as a "hired gun" first officer for a local company. These are fun, and the pay is pretty good. They only let me fly the empty legs, which seems fair, but the head of their flight department respects my experience and encourages me to do some instruction. I usually find something worth discussing, so am comfortable logging the time as "dual given." Some regulation junkie will probably find a way to say that this amounts to padding my logbook; he or she is entitled to that opinion. But when the pilot involved knows more at the end of the flight than at the beginning, I say that instruction has been received.

The big surprise this week was a flight plan to the midwest. I hesitate to call it a plan: there were only two fixes, the departure airport and the destination airport. This has been a topic for friendly debate between me and this company's pilots. They contend that this kind of planning tells Air Traffic Control (ATC) that it is OK to send the airplane wherever works best. But you know what? ATC will send the airplane wherever works best anyway. So there is no advantage.

What advantage do I see? Imagine a trip of 1000 nautical miles. This is almost 5% of the Earth's radius, so the big picture really comes into play.

If there is a center of high- or low-pressure, you can save a lot of time by passing on the proper side (when westbound, choose the polar side of a high, the equatorial side of a low). In this case, there were no major high- or low-pressure centers along the route. This route is long enough that terms like "polar" and "equatorial" really mean something.

You have no idea what the computerized flight planning software uses to estimate the winds aloft, because it all gets rolled up into one composite estimate. It is very unlikely that the winds will be unchanged over a route that long. Your strategy will be a lot different if you are flying into a decreasing headwind than if you were flying into an increasing headwind. This strategy depends on...

You don't have a howgozit. That's a corrupted spellingof "How goes it?," i.e., judging whether you are making adequate progress or not. [Gulp: a google search for "howgozit navigation" comes up with my book first!] Will you have enough fuel to make it? The last part of our flight would cross a significant amount of Great Lakes water, and the possibilities for refueling over the Great Lakes are few, so we would need to know early that there might be a fuel problem.

The thing is that if it appears that you will be short of fuel, and you have a solid forecast of a decreasing headwing/increasing tailwind, then you are not short of fuel. If it appears that you are short of fuel, and the forecast is less than solid or the headwind is forecast to increase, then you are really short of fuel.

The comparison between the actual winds aloft and the forecast winds aloft is one of your best tools for judging the accuracy of the forecast. But this is impossible if all you have is one composite number that is supposed to work for 1,000 miles.

On the other hand, I really expect to fly direct. I compare the time abeam the fix to the predicted time to decide whether I am ahead or behind.

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We had a pleasant trip, except for dodging a few thunderstorms. We talked about some of these issues. On the way back the captain put a few waypoints onto his flight log.

Class B silliness

I had some mathematical business in Salt Lake City, a great opportunity to fly the Archer. I invited my friend and student Dennis along so he could see what the big leagues are like. His radio work is excellent, so I knew he would pick things up quickly. But ATC kind of gave him the wrong impression...

[I will leave the Lockheed-Martin-FSS-bashing to others.]

We got flight following from Center on the way. I asked the last Center controller to arrange a handoff to Salt Lake Approach, which he promised. He sent us to the IFR arrival frequency. So far, so good.

It took a while for approach to answer, and then it was "Say request." Wasn't this a handoff? We got a new squawk code and a request for our position, but never heard "radar contact," although he acted like he saw us.

VFR arrivals from the north can choose the shoreline of the Great Salt Lake or Mountain Road, which passes very close to the mountains east of Salt Lake City. I asked the controller which he wanted, and he told us to "turn toward Point of the Mountain, make that Mountain Road, remain east of Hill AFB." Point of the Mountain is south of KSLC, 45 miles away, not an appropriate place for us to aim, but, hey, he caught the error himself.

He did not say "Cleared into the Class Bravo airspace." Dennis confirms this.

There were lots of F-16s in the air, launching from and recovering at Hill, and the frequency was busy. A Citation came on the frequency, headed to Ogden, but did not clue in to how busy it was, reading back in a slow drawl "Ohkay, y'all want Citation XXX to descend and maintain six thooouuuuuuuuuusand feet M S L?" And he was VFR! He missed a couple of turns, and the turn onto final, keeping the controller busy while we sped toward the Class B without a clearance. With two miles to go I spun myself, advising that we would circle "awaiting Class Bravo clearance." I honestly thought that his would jog his memory and he would give us the clearance, but I had done three full turns before a new controller came on. "I can't leave you on that heading," she said [WTF? We were circling!], "Fly heading 210 so I can get you west of Hill. Didn't the last controller give you Class B clearance?" I just read back "Two-one-zero, eight thousand, and negative on the clearance." I was a little peeved that the previous controller had ignored my request for clarification, sent me to the wrong place, and omitted the Class B clearance.

We crossed the Hill localizer, with lots of F-16s darting below us, while a pair cavorted in the airspace we had just vacated. Once west of Hill. she turned us back to the south, and as she handed me off to the next sector said "Thanks for your help."

That, I told Dennis, was the closest thing to an apology you'll ever get.

Things smoothed out after this, until landing. "Turn left at K7 and contact Ground point-niner," the tower controller said, using the previous aircraft's call sign. "Was that for us?" I asked, using our call sign, and he replied "Say request." I made the turn and called Ground.

Then came a mixup with a King Air, who did not understand the ground controller's request to call at the appropriate spot, as marked both on the taxi chart and on the pavement. "I cain't see no blue spot," he said. The controller told him to remain clear of the taxiway and give way to us.

We taxied closer but did not see the King Air. I guess the controller didn't either, for a while, and when he figured it out he asked with clear surprise in his voice if the King Air was "...still facing the hangar?!?" No wonder the guy saw nothing: he was looking the wrong way.

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So, here are the results

ATC Errors

No-handoff handoff

No "radar contact"

vague clearance...

...to the wrong place

No Class B clearance, at least not out loud

long vector to correct side of valley

wrong call sign from tower

Pilot Errors

Slow-talkin' VFR Citation

Bass-ackwards King Air


All in all, not the greatest day on anyone's part.