The Changing Aviation Landscape

Don Brown has an interesting post on the hassles that aerial survey flights can create for ATC. He also touches on the hassles of direct, off-airway routings. I thought about posting a comment, but didn't think I could get my points across in 300 words or less, so ...

Don's first observation is how much of a pain aerial survey flights can be for controllers. I've flown a number of survey flights and let me tell you, they are a pain for the pilots and camera operators, too. I'm sure working these flights as a controller is tedious, but imagine the concentration required to maintain altitude +/-20 feet and course within 10 meters for hours at a time. Add to that the problems created by turbulence, an occasion cloud shadow, the odd traffic alert, camera malfunctions, and a mapping site located smack-dab in the middle of an arrival path for two major Bay Area airports. It's clear that no one is having fun.

Aerial survey flights are a lot of work for everyone involved, starting with the GIS person who lays out the job. During my survey flying, I've been fortunate to have received excellent and understanding service from the controllers in Northern California as well as from airline crews that had to alter their course or altitude while we bored holes in the sky, back and forth.

I had one mission that involved a bunch of east-west lines right over the top of Travis AFB and the Travis Alert Area. The controller did a pretty good job, but he kept asking what we were doing and which direction we were going. I explained at least three times that we would be flying east-west lines, gradually working our way from south to north, but he couldn't visualize it. I tried explaining it different ways while simultaneously flying my photo lines. It was distracting, but I finally managed to word it in a way that he understood. Or maybe he just gave up trying to understand?

I'd say any sort of training that helps controllers appreciate aerial survey missions is probably a good thing. One silver lining during that Travis flight was that someone reported hearing an emergency locator transmitter (ELT) signal and I began monitoring the guard frequency on our second radio. As we went back and forth, I was able to give the controller a pretty good idea of where the signal was strongest.

On the subject of direct, off-airway routings, there are several problems the FAA needs to address. It's obvious that the aviation navigational landscape is changing and the ATC system is not providing pilots and controllers with enough tools to keep up with the changes. Here are just a few examples:

Any pilot who uses a GPS receiver knows that the FAA's way of identifying airports on charts with three-character identifiers is ambiguous, especially when there is an airport and a VOR station with the same name. This could be solved if the FAA would just use four-character ICAO airport identifiers on the charts they publish. That way, pilots and controllers would have a better idea of when they were referring to, say, the Santa Rosa Airport (KSTS) versus the Santa Rosa VOR (STS).

The FAA has started to create routes specifically designed for RNAV-equipped aircraft. T-routes, Q-routes, and GPS MEAs on established airways are all steps in the right direction. But T-routes and Q-routes mimic the old Victor airway paradigm and don't really address random, off-airway routings.

The section 5-1-8(c) of the AIM has specific suggestions for pilots who wish to file direct routes between VORs and off-airway routings. It briefly explains how you can file VOR to VOR or use off-airway routings. One requirement is that an off-airway route must contain at least one waypoint within each Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) through which the flight will travel, but I imagine from a controller's perspective this can be like finding a needle in a haystack.

The AIM explains that you can use latitude and longitude coordinates to specify off-airway waypoints, but lat/long is a pain for pilots and controllers alike. Just yesterday I had an instrument pilot show me his DUATS-generated IFR navigation log, which contained a couple of automatically generated lat/long waypoints. When he asked me how he would go about entering them into his Garmin 530W, I cringed. I thought about delving into how you first need to create a user waypoint and then enter the latitude and longitude, a digit at a time, but there is need to know and nice to know. User waypoints defined with lat/long is not a need to know item, in my opinion.

Pilots need to do some careful pre-flight planning to be sure their direct route stays at least 3 miles from restricted and prohibited airspace as well as military operation areas (MOAs). APOAs new Internet Flight Planer is definitely a step in the right direction. Using it, pilot's should be able to layout direct, off-airway routings that meet all the requirement specified in the AIM. But what about controllers? What tools do they have?

A big problem with off-airway routes is that these routes are often hard for controllers and pilots to understand and visualize. As Don correctly points out, who the hell knows where lat/long fix 3217/8326 is actually located? Without some known context, a landmark, an airport, or a VOR, it's just a string of numbers. It seems to me that controllers would benefit from a tool or feature that would allow them to quickly resolve an unfamiliar airport identifier, fix, or lat/long waypoint to a position on their radar screen. I remember sitting next to an ZOA controller during a facility tour several years ago and seeing how he could select an aircraft target on his screen, press a button, and see that aircraft's projected track. Wouldn't it be cool if a controller could select a target, press a button, and see the aircraft's current IFR routing appear on their screen? Maybe this feature already exists, but based on what I hear controllers say, I doubt it.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I wrote a while back about how ATC's automation often can't accommodate flight plans with RNAV, off-airway routings. It seems that most controllers don't even know which targets on their screen are RNAV capable. Pilots often have no choice but to accept a clearance and, once airborne, begin asking the controller for a shortcut, reminding or informing the controller that they are RNAV-capable.

Pilots and controllers live in intersecting, yet different worlds. Most pilots don't fully appreciate the constraints under which controllers operate, the rules and procedures they need to follow, and the complexities of managing a bunch of aircraft traveling different directions at different speeds. Controllers often have a hard time understanding the operational constraints that pilots face, too. And the primary way these two worlds communicate with each other is through a half-duplex radio system. Given all this, it's amazing that things work as well as they do.

Wouldn't it be nice if someone came up with a way to reconcile some of the differences between these two worlds? I'm not touting NexGen, I'm interested in hearing what my readers have to say. What features or tools do you think are needed for the new aviation navigational world we seem to be entering? What do you think would help GA pilots?

Charting a New Course

The new Northern California T-routes I wrote about a while back in April now appear on the NACO and Jeppesen IFR en route charts. For some pilots, this should be a welcome relief. Here's an email I received a while back:

I frequently fly IFR from S50 to KRHV. Just before SAC, they amend my filed plan (... V23 SAC V334 SUNOL) to "... depart SAC at hdg 157 and intercept the ECA 215 radial, then fly hdg 215 to CEDES". The first time they gave me this clearance, it was a curve ball, I got off GPS mode and navigated to CEDES using VORs (I could have used OBS, but didn’t bother). However, upon closer inspection, I realized that all they did was send me to MOVDD, then CEDES. So I wonder why they simply don’t clear me "... direct MOVDD direct CEDES". In the 3 times I have flown this route IFR, every single time, I got this funky clearance.

Assuming controllers have been briefed on T-routes and assuming they can determine when an aircraft is equipped for en route RNAV, this reader's amended clearance should simply be "cleared Sacramento, Tango 259, CEDES ..."

At least one ZSE controller told me a few months ago that they had not been trained on the use of T-routes and, at that time, were not assigning them in clearances even if specifically requested by pilots to do so. There are a bunch of aircraft out there equipped to fly T-routes and we can only hope the FAA will work out the training and procedural side of things.

Messin' with Mr. T

If there was any doubt in your mind that this is the most obscure aviation blog around, this post should put the issue to rest once and for all. After my last post that included some information about T-routes, I got curious about the routes that have been proposed for the San Francisco and Sacramento areas. A little searching uncovered Federal Aviation Administration 14 CFR Part 71 Docket No. FAA-2008-0037; Airspace Docket No. 07-AWP-6, Proposed Establishment of Low Altitude Area Navigation Routes (T-Routes); Sacramento and San Francisco, CA.

A couple of things about this Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. First, the public comment period has expired so it seems doubtful that there will be any further public input. If you feel left out, keep in mind that most pilots to whom I've spoken hadn't heard of these proposed T-routes either. Another fascinating aspect of this proposal is that I could find no depiction of the routes, just the waypoints that define the routes and their Lat/Long coordinates.

Using a Mac-based mapping program and a San Francisco Sectional raster map that I purchased and downloaded from NACO, I entered the waypoints and created some maps of these routes. I couldn't find any reference to the proposed minimum en route altitudes for these routes, which would be really good to know about since the smaller aircraft that will probably use these routes tend to be susceptible to airframe icing.

I shouldn't have to say this, BUT DON'T USE ANY OF THESE DEPICTIONS FOR NAVIGATION UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

Here's T-257, which routes you from the Big Sur VORTAC to the Point Reyes VORTAC. I'd previously thought the waypoint SUTRO was just west of the ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone) and that the route was quite a distance from the shore which would entail more risk for single-engine aircraft. However an astute reader pointed out an error in the lat/long that as specified in the NPR. This route is very close to a direct route between Point Reyes and Big Sur.



Here's T-259, which gets you between the SAC VORTAC and the San Jose VOR. This route looks pretty good to me, but again I have no idea what the MEA is for this proposed route.



Here's T-261, which could be handy for getting from Half Moon Bay to points east, across the SFO and Oakland arrivals. Again, no MEA seems to be available.



Here's T-263 which gets you from SUNOL to the Scaggs Island VORTAC and points northwest and vice versa. This route is basically the radar vectored route you get when you are arriving into Oakland or Hayward on an IFR flight plan from the northwest. When the Bay Area is on the Southeast Plan, this route might allow you to get on top of the arrivals to Oakland and SFO, rather than being sent to the northeast side of Mt. Diablo and then up the Carquinez Strait. Keep in mind that all of this is pure conjecture at this point.



This all seem reminicent of the NPR for the Leemore MOA that was recently created, a process that was only slightly more publicized. Of course the difference is that these T-routes will provide something that the average pilot might use rather than defining airspace that pilots should avoid.