Personal Minimums

People have thrown the phrase "personal minimums" around for a long time, but I think there's been something missing from the discussion. And while I am writing this for Sport Pilots, it really applies to every pilot.

The safety gurus try to make the "personal minimum" decision sound easy, but I've never found it that clear cut. A few years ago I was flying some very nicely equipped King Airs, took annual simulator training, and had to take a semi-annual instrument check. If it was legal I could handle it. Well, at least "legal" in the King Air. One winter afternoon I took off in my Taylorcraft and headed west across the desert. It was VFR but the white sky and snowy ground meant that there was no visible horizon. The T-Cart had a venturi driven turn needle that seemed to work best on hot days, so my instrument proficiency was of absolutely no use. I turned around and landed.

In other words, a pilot who was IFR proficient below 1/2 mile visibility cancelled a flight because it wasn't good enough VFR. It takes two to tango.

The FARs contain a huge loophole for charter pilots (14CFR135) that I flew through regularly. To launch on a charter flight you could use any combination of reports and forecasts to make sure that the weather would be legal when you arrived. So a forecast for bad weather that was worse than the reported weather meant I could go. Incredibly poor reported weather could be ignored if the forecast said it might improve, even if every ounce of common sense indicated that the forecast was wrong.

FAR 61.315 spells out sport pilot privileges and limitations. These seem pretty clear-cut: no night flight, no flight above 10,000 feet MSL except within 2,000 feet of the surface, no flight with less than 3 miles flight or surface visibility. The last one means no Special VFR, and no taking "advantage" of the reduced visibility required by FAR91.155 for Day VFR in Class G airspace. (This so-called advantage is the classic example of something that is legal but not safe.)

Furthermore, a Sport Pilot must maintain ground contact. A Private Pilot may legally fly above an overcast, and sometimes this can be safe. Sometimes. But a Sport Pilot may never do this.

The reason Sport Pilots have these limitations is that they are not required to have instrument training, while Private Pilots must have three hours of "hood" time. It always seems a shame to put someone under the hood on a pretty day, but still I make my Private Pilot students fly to the practice area and back under the hood, and they also spend some cross-country time unable to watch our lovely scenery go by.

Even if you are a private pilot, you are limited to these conditions if you have limited yourself to Sport Pilot privileges by using your driver's license as your medical.

So what's the problem?

The problem is that there's no mention of the forecasts.

I've visited a few EAA chapters recently and I have heard a lot of talk about Oshkosh. Some of it has come from me, because the last time I made it to Oshkosh was before my teenagers were born, and it's long past time to go again. As I think fondly of the great people I met there and the wonderful things I saw and learned, I can't help but recall that every time I have gone to Oshkosh it's been IFR. I think one time the visibility was 2 miles, but never 3 while I was flying. If you get a standard briefing then you'll get a NOTAM for IFR conditions. Pay attention.

Enroute it may not have been IFR but VFR flight was a lot more comfortable above the convective layer. If there are scattered cumulus then it's OK for a Sport Pilot to be "on top", but when the clouds are broken being on top is questionable and when the clouds are overcast it's illegal. The Area Forecast should give you some information about the cloud tops.

Any trip east from my home airport involves lots of mountain flying. There is a route from home to Oshkosh that stays below 10,000 feet MSL, but there are lots of wind conditions that make 2,000 feet above the ground too low for my taste: think about the Steve Fossett accident. And more than once I've found the valley I intended to fly through blocked by rain or snow. "Sometimes you just have to fly toward the blue sky," but what if that means climbing above 10,000 MSL? Can your airplane do it? Can you do it, legally?

So you really have to pay attention when you see those little hints like VCSH in the TAF. (That means showers in the vicinity.)

The missing piece of the personal minimum decision comes from understanding the forecasts. TV weather is fine for a local flight, but when you set off on that looooong cross-country you really need to understand the forecasts.

Your ability to obtain, read, and interpret a forecast becomes part of your "personal minimums." If you can't understand the forecast then you shouldn't go.

Any pilot who intends to fly any serious cross-country really needs to practice with TAFs and Area Forecasts

Prince Nymph

Our annual fishing get-together in Montana is traditionally on the first Fall weekend with snow, so I was afraid when we moved it to late August. Would it really snow that early? But I confidently reserved the Archer and did some flight planning. Flight planning for this trip is silly, not because I have done it many times but because the high terrain means that there is really only one route: I-15 to US Highway 20 to US Highway 287.

Even sillier was the the AOPA Internet Flight Planner, which proposed a 2001 NM odyssey that went well into British Columbia.

Not so silly was the long term forecast. The same high terrain that makes the flight planning easy rules out any kind of IFR flight in something like an Archer. Ennis, where I was headed, has no instrument approach, and the MEA on the airway overhead is 15,000' MSL, clearly out of reach. Dillon might be an acceptable choice; the MEA there is "only" 12,000, which is within reach but leaves you no options.



So I drove. Call me chicken, but I had to had to had to be back at school on Monday, and the probability of a successful VFR flight was way too low.

Sunday saw lots of thunderstorms with hail and high winds. There was a short window when I could have made it from Dillon but that would have been at a price; the headwind was so strong that my car's gas mileage was decreased by about 10%. To the east I could see the Madison Valley, where Ennis is: the valley was blocked by thunderstorms all evening. I would have been stuck.

My reward? I caught more fish than anyone else.

Practicing What I Preach

It's time for the annual family trip to my sister-in-law's farm in South Dakota. It's 700 nautical miles, and we take the Club's Cherokee Six, which trues about 140 knots. The Six is not the most comfortable airplane I have flown, but it can take the four of us and full fuel with capacity to spare. Full fuel is 84 gallons, which is well over 5 hours' worth, but nobody's bladder can make it that long.

So do I practice what I preach?

Current charts? Kind of: I couldn't find all of the sectionals I needed at the local pilot shops, so I used a WAC chart for part of the flight, supplemented by current instrument enroute charts. WAC charts don't show airspace. I had current approach plates for any airport we were remotely likely to use.

Weight and balance? Yes. I made the family wait on the ramp while I figured this. "Can we load yet?"

Checklists? Yes. I had my daughter read them to me.

Flight plans filed and opened? Yes. By the way, I like the DUATS email notification when the flight plan is transmitted to FSS.

Flight following? Sort of. The Idaho portion of the trip is below radar coverage, so none was avaiable. I called Casper approach 30 miles out, so got some coverage then. But then we left Casper naked. I monitored Center frequencies, but that was mostly for entertainment. For example:

Aircraft: Center, your transmissions are getting pretty weak!
ZLC: I have multiple transmitters, and the other plane is hundreds of miles away. How's this one?
Aircraft: Loud and clear. [stage whisper] Sorry!

Or another:

ZDV: United 123, there's an F-16 going to pass on your left, he's got 100 knots on you." In other words, the F-16 was 100 knots faster.

Oh, they're shooting F-16s out of Ellsworth AFB! I called Center and got flight following.

Navigation logs? Yup, I had navigation logs (one form the AOPA Internet Flight Planner, and one from DUATS.

But I used my handheld GPS (old, no moving map) for the whole trip. This got me thinking: what would I have done if the visibility had been, say, 6 miles? There would be no comfort in spotting the Black Hills 50 NM ahead, and pilotage across Wyoming is a real test of map interpretation skills. Those "rivers" on the left are often dry, although this year's extra rain has made the riparian area green and thus more visible form the air than I can ever remember. There are few roads, fewer cities, and even fewer public-use airports.

So I know the answer: navigation in 6 miles visibility is just too hard. I would file IFR, even though the trip would be longer.

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The municipal airport where we landed has a few hangars with ag planes and one open hangar with a recently-restored Super Cub. You can see the city from the field but it's actually a good walk. I wandered around for a while looking for cell phone coverage, finding none ("More bars in more places?????"), but closed our flight plan using the phone in the pilot's lounge. The lounge consists of a table and chair, a phone, and a bathroom. It smells of uncured concrete. The bathroom light is on a timer; twist it to get 10 minutes of light, which should be more than enough, right? There are a few aviation magazines on the table. You've got to love it.

That Sinking Feeling...

I was just back from a big trip, and my student was excited to hear about it. A teaching opportunity!

I took him over to the big wall chart made of pasted-together sectionals. You know the kind; most flight schools and FBOs have them. You never really know how old they are, but, excepting Mount Saint Helens, the terrain doesn't change.

I started at the eastern edge of the chart. "We started about here" I said, touching a point on the wall off the chart, "then came over this VOR and took up a heading for here." I touched the places on the map as I talked. I pointed out which frequencies I used to call Flight Service, and told him about Flight Watch. "There was some weather here, so we diverted like this, and landed here," I went on, touching the map again. I talked about the recent heavy rains, and how I had searched extra hard to find a good dry field to land in in case of engine failure. A pretty good lesson, I'm thinking to myself, maybe I should take the whole trip as a tax writeoff?

"What's this?" he asked, pointing to a Military Operations Area. The abbreviation is MOA, and most people read it aloud, sounding like a Georgian asking for seconds.

The MOA lay directly across where we flew. My heart sank. While it is legal to fly VFR through a MOA, it's better to call and ask whether it is active. If it is, stay clear. But that wasn't the problem; the problem was that it appeared that I hadn't even noticed the MOA while flying through. That's inexcusable.


I had had that feeling before. I remember circling a certain airport while waiting for clearance into the New York TCA (TCA, or Terminal Control Area, was the old name for Class B). It was annoying to wait, and I eventually gave up and went around, adding miles to my flight. Later, I looked at one of those wall charts, which showed the airport to be well inside the TCA at my altitude. Had I busted the TCA? I ran and got a current chart, which showed that I had been outside the TCA, which had shrunk at some point. Look at the sectional to the left: Somerset is well clear of the New York Class B boundary (the circular arc starting near the middle of the top and ending at the SE corner). But it wasn't like that on the wall chart. Phew!


This time I did the same thing; I pulled the chart I had used to maybe cross the MOA unaware out of my flight bag. "Always use current charts," I said. I unfolded it and looked: no MOA. Phew!

Airspace changes, and (remember Mount Saint Helens!) even the terrain changes. New radio towers go up, old towers come down. Use current charts!