Flight Planning

Many of today’s workplaces seek to create a formalized “safety culture,” an environment where employees practice behaviors that minimize accidents, look out for their co-workers and where reporting unsafe conditions is encouraged, not subject to retaliation, and frequently rewarded. It can be a great goal, but it often creates an exaggerated sense of safety where […]

A few days ago, departing Minot North Dakota for Duluth in a Skylane, I asked ATC if the NOTAM for military training at Duluth had the airport closed, or whether it was open to GA traffic. He asked me to stand by for a minute, and then said, “It’s closed at the moment, but will […]

ForeFlight now lets pilots import, use and share custom content bundles through its Custom Content Packs feature. Introduced last month, Content Packs can include customized airport diagrams; procedure plates; georeferenced charts; map layers containing shapes, points and labels; and navigation data that links custom waypoints to PDF files. As shown in the video below, users […]

A front is the border where one distinct air mass meets another. More correctly it’s a frontal area, since the contact surface stretches from the ground into the upper limit of the troposphere. The area that intersects the ground is where the front is drawn on a meteorological analysis map. The front is defined based […]

The government shutdown is delaying an urgent update of the World Magnetic Model, the underlying basis for all modern navigation systems, and those systems are in danger of becoming unacceptably inaccurate. Magnetic North, the wandering point near the North Pole that is the reference for navigation services, is racing away from Canada toward Siberia. It’s […]

Heading north from Santa Monica to Oakland and approaching San Jose, I heard the following: Approach: “N1234, remain east and north of highway 101.” N1234: “Ah, 1234, roger.” Approach: “N1234, please remain east and north of the freeway.” N1234: “Ah OK, 101, 1234.” Approach: “N1234, do you see that long thing on your right with […]