Flight Planning

I was flying southbound in the Los Angeles basin in mid‑July 2017 when I heard a VFR pilot trying to get a shortcut through the Los Angeles Class Bravo airspace. SoCal: “NXXXXX how do you plan to navigate the LA Bravo airspace?” Pilot: “SoCal I’d like to go through the Bravo, LAX direct Brown Field.” […]

Back in the days when Pueblo, Colorado, still had a TRACAB (terminal radar in the tower cab), I was visiting with the controllers when the following took place. A Cessna pilot, who hopefully was a student, was on a flight from Colorado Springs, field elevation of 6,172 feet MSL, to Pueblo, elevation 4,725 feet MSL. […]

The FAA plans to shut down circling approaches wherever feasible, and last week the agency published its selection criteria for deciding which approaches will be cancelled. The changes are part of an effort to “right-size” the National Airspace System, and eliminate redundant and unnecessary procedures, the FAA said. Input from AOPA was taken into consideration. […]

Flying an RV-8 from Los Angeles, California to Oxfordshire, England in 19 days may strike many as an adventure of a lifetime. For me, the 7,000-n.m. trip was my way to return home after working four years in the Tesla Motors Design Studio in Hawthorne, California. Airfields along the Crimson Route, partially developed in WW-II […]

Too many IFR pilots don’t know their GPS as intimately as they should. Hitting “Direct To” and their destination is as much as many can muster out of their navigator. There is a serious lack of knowledge of what the GPS is trying to tell them. The most basic information a GPS provides to a […]

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The FAA is continuing to develop and expand its Offshore Precipitation Capability (OPC) system, which uses machine learning and image processing to estimate precipitation intensity and echo top heights in areas where Next Generation Radar (NEXRAD) is not available. While not as precise as radar in identifying the location and intensity of precipitation—although with greater […]