Flying July 2023

ALASKA: LARGER-THAN-LIFE and adventure in every direction. Its massive size, range upon range of jagged mountains, never-ending glaciers, and countless places to land offer pilots with the right aircraft and skills to match something magical that exists nowhere else on Earth. The pilots who call Alaska home and hone their craft here are the real deal. To be able to spend a week flying with a few of them and experiencing just a taste of what the state has to offer was truly the trip of a lifetime. Three airplanes, three friends, Wisconsin to Alaska and back with more than 80 tach hours and 6,500 miles—it was an adventure that has to be experienced to understand. The beauty of this place is beyond words. This shot is of Jeff Russell…

NO ONE REALLY WANTS TO USE LEAD ANYMORE. I figure that I’ve personally sumped countless gallons of 100LL during preflights stretching back 35-plus years—with no small amount perfuming the cuffs of my beloved leather aviator’s jacket I wore through most of the early ’90s—and I have yet to grow a second head. But there’s no longer a compelling reason to use tetraethyl lead (TEL) as the antiknock agent of choice in the fuel for our piston fleet. We’re ready to innovate through to a better solution. And it seems everyone is in violent agreement on this. Currently, four enterprises have viable alternatives in various stages of testing and acceptance for entry into the market. But we’re at a logjam when it comes to getting those high-octane fuels over the finish…

THERE IS SO MUCH going on in aviation right now—it’s a very exciting time to be in the industry. Its future has not been this bright since the late 1940s with the dawn of the jet age. In just over three decades, we evolved from the Douglas DC-3 to the Boeing 747 and then Concorde. In that same time, we saw a massive amount of momentum toward space exploration and innovation. It was truly a remarkable period in the aerospace industry. The leaps made during the 1950s and ’60s in aerospace were buoyed by a combination of private capital and defense spending but were also fueled by the dream of what was possible when technology, engineering, innovation, and investment came together. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, global aerospace innovation…

View From Above Julie [Boatman], I enjoyed your column in the latest FLYING issue, especially about the progress GA is making toward sustainability. I’m glad there were no protesters at AERO 2023. I expected there would be. I would not be surprised if some showed up at Oshkosh, which after all is one big Fossil Fuel Fest. Protesters chained themselves to the door and gate of my FBO recently, protesting private jets. I am very concerned about what’s coming and when. I am an environmentalist as well as a lifelong pilot. I currently fly a gas-guzzling piston twin. We need to cut emissions to zero—and soon. Countries around the world are setting dates to ban the sale of internal combustion vehicles by dates as early as 2030. A couple of…

Most traffic between the Northeastern U.S. and the eastern Caribben uses this routing, several hundred miles shorter than following the East Coast. The airspace is called the Western Atlantic Route System, known by its acronym, WATRS. It uses 12 published airways labeled (from west to east) L451 through L462. Most are oriented north-south and spaced 60 nm apart. The availability of Bermuda as an engine-out alternative makes these routes usable even for non-ETOPS aircraft. WATRS is controlled by New York Oceanic FIR, which owns a huge swath of the western Atlantic between 21 and 45 degrees N. The small portions of WATRS that are within radar and VHF coverage operate similarly to domestic airspace. Else-where, nonradar position reporting procedures apply via high-frequency (HF) radio on 3,000 to 22,000 KHz. HF…

ITS DOWNTOWN AREA is known for shopping and dining—but that isn’t all Martha’s Vineyard has to offer. Many visitors and residents alike know the island for its outdoor features, which include cliffs, gardens, wildlife sanctuaries, beautiful northeastern beaches, and ongoing natural beauty. Oh, and the fresh seafood can’t hurt either. Can you imagine a better way to first scope out the area than arriving by air? I can’t. But sometimes you might find yourself arriving in weather that requires an instrument flight plan. And one of the most reliable approaches to the Martha’s Vineyard airport is the ILS. A ACK VOR TO TRANSITION Coming from the south or east, a pilot could expect to be asked to transition over the Nantucket (ACK) VOR onto the approach. A thicker line on…