NAVIGATION
will have mysteriously (and silently) changed. So everything you depend on needs to be checked – a user way point of ‘November’ you created and used successfully a week ago might have been over-written to be a different place at a different airfield, for example. The trick with using GPS is not to be distracted by equipment in the cockpit so that you can focus on flying, so why not minimise expected alerts during planning? Flying is even more enjoyable if you bear this in mind – why plan to skim airspace with multi-electronic airspace warnings interrupting your thoughts and lookout when you could actually design the route to minimise warnings, knowing that when you get one it’s more of a rare occurrence which needs attention? For a year or so, there has been a campaign about routing two miles laterally or 200ft vertically from regulated airspace
if possible, so why not use this, or even more, as a buffer for a more enjoyable and, if the warnings are audible, quieter flight. Let's be clear, while GPS in flight can enhance your situational awareness, even to 3D and including 'other traffic', it changes nothing in the overall general process of flight preparation. There's still all the self-checking discipline of 'should I be flying?' (medical fitness, expiry dates, etc.), Notam and weather, fuel calculations, mass/balance and performance still need to be considered. If using a simple GPS or an app, it’s worth making sure once in a while that you can still use the official UK (text only) Notam site
www.ais.org.uk to check a route, even for a test route that will never be flown. There will come a day, perhaps at a remote field away from mobile phone internet access, when your only means of Notam checking is via a hard-wired
desktop without the right browsers, and that’s not the time to discover you have forgotten your AIS password or how to actually run an ‘old-fashioned' non graphical Notam check. Yes, most preparation can now be done on screen more easily, electronically, graphically and, even better as far as most pilots are concerned, faster, but it still needs to be done. An infringement (and associated Airprox) of an airshow RA(T) (Restricted Area (temporary)) in the Midlands this year showed a pilot could not have checked the Notam properly prior to flight.
He’d used a software app merely for planning tracks and avoiding permanent airspace, but he didn’t connect to the internet to check for up-to-date Notam just prior to flight. Some GPS units and apps do, of course, warn you that that Notam might be out of date if you try to fly even an hour later without connecting to refresh them.
This particular incident was an
expensive way to realise that temporary airspace restrictions mean simple route planning without checking Notam isn’t enough. Even a call to the NATS airspace upgrade free recorded message on the day would have solved the problem (in this case). The number is 08085 354802 (or +44 1489 887515) and if you’ve never used it, give it a try now and then store the number in your phone. However, while calling the number
SUMMER 2019 CLUED UP 9
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