Points for Pilots

  From Dallas to Canadian, TX What do you make of the pilot's decision —  that's me  —  to fly the red segment to KCDS, the Childress, TX airport, then change direction and follow the green route to the refueling stop KHHF, the Hemphill County airport in Canadian, TX? Daring? The green segment cuts through a yellow/orange/red area produced by radar. It warns of significant levels of rain. Nearby yellow lightning bolts indicate that systems augmenting radar have detected lightning. Taken together, it means that significant thunderstorms are ahead. On top, all this is included in a large brown-shaded area for which a SIGMET (significant meteorological information) predicts major thunderstorms. Flying into that mess seems like folly, doesn't it? We include the picture here as part of a discussion how radar images and SIGMET predictions should guide a pilot's decisions. Let's start. With the advent of ADS-B and XM-Weather, pilots now have a lot of weather informatio...

   Salt Lake City Terminal Area Chart In summer 2024 we had hiked for several days in Teton National Park and were ready for the return flight from Rexburg, ID to Dallas. In earlier years the return route had taken us east across Wyoming, then southeasterly via Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma back to Dallas. Unfortunately, that route was blocked every afternoon by massive thunderstorms.  A safe and interesting alternate route emerged: We would go south across Utah, stop at the Canyonlands airport in Moab for fuel, then proceed southeasterly via Albuquerque, NM to Dallas. Starting from Rexburg, it seemed easiest to fly south across Salt Lake City at a low altitude. That thought evaporated when we looked at the Terminal Area Chart for Salt Lake City, see above.  Indeed: The Federal Aviation Administration has managed to overload that chart. A number of magenta boxes specify special rules, the class B airspace has been divided into numerous parts, various preferred route...

  Use of fan-cooled iPad   In a previous post we described a mount for the iPad that allowed for convective cooling from below. That system worked quite well for several years. But now and then the iPad overheated and had to be shut down.  This happened often toward the end of a long trip.  In each such case, the forced shutdown was really annoying:  No longer could we see ADS-B information about nearby aircraft and couldn't navigate precisely under tight airspace conditions. Not good. Due to these difficulties, we decided to create an active cooling system using a fan. This post has the details. The earlier post described how the cover for the iPad was modified to open up two cutouts on the back.  We won't repeat the details of that modification and only point out that we enlarged these cutouts to create a maximum area exposing the back of the iPad. The photo below shows the resulting backside, with the iPad inserted. Never mind the rough appearance of t...

  Aviation Weather Center (AWC) Prog Chart Forty years ago, filing a flight plan was complicated. You wrote the relevant information on a special form, called the flight service, and explained that you wanted to file a flight plan. In a tedious back and forth, you transmitted the data in the sequence provided by the form, often interrupted by clarification of names and other possibly misunderstood information. Activation was done after takeoff. You called the flight service using a particular frequency. This often was done under pressure since you wanted to use the radio for something else, like listening to other traffic in the area. This gradually improved, and you could file the flight plan using a computer. But if you took off immediately afterward and tried to activate the flight plan, the Flight Service didn’t have access to the flight plan yet and hence couldn’t activate it.  The remedy to that problem was a tedious filing process done via radio, with lots of correction...