Touring Machine Company

There are a lot of things in the FARs that I have a hard time remembering and a lot that I find confusing at first glance. I figured that if I have trouble others might too so I’ve collected my thoughts here. There are lots of things that I find interesting that appear here as well.

The Detroit/Pontiac branch of NOAA’s National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office has a glossary of weather terms. It includes common terms that every airman should know like Air Mass Thunderstorm as well as less common terms like Alberta Clipper that apply to certain areas of the country. I especially like the odd-ball terms like Achluophobia: [...]

From the Piper Flyer article RITTRs Understood.
“The NPRM defines a RITTR as a low altitude route based on Area Navigation for GPS-equipped aircraft designed to expedite the handling of IFR overflight traffic through busy terminal airspace areas. From this definition emerge three key concepts that pilots wishing to use these routes should understand.
First, RITTRs are [...]

I’ve been listening to the JFK tower and approach and LiveATC. They show up in iTunes so you only have to find them once and don’t need to download the Real or Microsoft players. It is interesting to listen to the takeoffs and landings at parallel runways like JFK, Las Vegas, or LAX. Landings usually [...]

I was listening to the tower at JFK and pulled up the airport diagram to follow along. I noticed the notation EMAS and 392 × 226 at the approach end of Rwy 22L.

The Google Maps image below shows what it looks like from the air.

View Larger Map
It turns out that there are many airports [...]

On May 16, 2007 Jeppesen started to display runway incursion hot spots in magenta on their IFR airport diagrams. The first two that I noticed are Atwater (KMER) and Santa Ana (KSNA). The NACO charts do not depict the hots spots at this time.1
Some airports are identifying hot spots on their web site. Atlanta’s Dekalb [...]

AOPA has a good course on GPS usage. Garmin has a simulator that you can use to explore the features of their GPS products.
GPS has a 100′ horizontal accuracy. If augmented with WAAS it has 10′ horizontal accuracy. The WAAS capability allows approaches with vertical guidance LPV and LNAV/VNAV.

LPV—Localizer performance with vertical guidance. ILS-like guidance. [...]

As pilots we often talk about night flying and daytime flying meaning when it is dark or light, but for logging time and for currency there are specific definitions that we must pay attention to.
FAR 1.1 General Definitions
Night means the time between the end of evening civil twilight and the beginning of morning civil twilight, [...]

Most pilots in the US are more familiar with temperature in degrees Fahrenheit than in degrees Celsius as reported in METARs, with the winds aloft forecasts, and in most aviation reports. And most pilots that I know don’t think in Celsius but need to make the conversion to Fahrenheit. If you know a couple of [...]

Finding the reciprocal of a compass heading.
The easiest way to find the opposite direction on a compass is to use a two step process. If the current direction is less than 180, add 200 and then subtract 20. If the current heading is greater than 180, subtract 200 then add 20. So for a simple [...]