OB429: Slant Useful and Beautiful

the whole concept that someone couldn't just go direct to a fix might be foreign to some new controllers. I think for me, if I was working and maybe I didn't see this and the guy checks in and says, I say clear direct this fix or this destination, they say, oh, we can't do that. And then I look down and I'm like, oh, ready. Welcome to opposing bases air traffic talk, an aviation podcast by two air traffic controllers and rated pilots who love to talk about flying, controlling and everything in between. The show is for entertainment purposes only and should not be used as a substitute for your instructor, your supervisor, the FA, the NTSB or your cat. The show will give you a better understanding of how things work in the national airspace system and maybe even make you laugh along the way. Please welcome retired Army pilot Alpha Golf and first officer at Penguin Airlines, Romeo Hotel. It's Wednesday, March 18th, 2026, episode 429 on today's show. We'll discuss non GPS air aircraft, help pilots remember their names and suggest a replacement to ground based radar. What's up, Bay J? Oh, hello, everyone. Happy Wednesday. Yes. Another amazing Wednesday and you're off the whole day today until 9pm. Right, until 9pm. Yeah, right, the whole day. How has the first part of your week gone with daytime traffic, the day dwellers, the sun flyers? Let's see, Monday was completely dead. Very slow. Because what do you think? Tornado warning. Oh, yeah, terrible weather. I forgot. Yeah, the weather was really bad. We actually evacuated the tower at one point. I did not. I was not there. Really? Yeah. I don't know. It was before I got there. I know I never did that. What's that's a high number for that to happen. It wasn't for the winds. It was for the tornado. Okay. Did they see it? Did they see the ground touchdown? I don't know. Because I was watching the TV. My wife was on the other side of town. And they got removed from their class and put into a hallway away from windows. And they had to wait it out. So I was with the weatherman at home on text. Well, everybody's okay, right? Yeah, I mean, nothing happened. Okay. But they had an active, I guess, I don't know if the airfield, if National Weather Service on the airfield was like, hey, there's, you know, we're tracking this or what, but something prompted the soup at the time to say, get out of the tower. Where did they go? I guess they went to the, I guess they just went down to the bottom. The, the, I talked to tech ups later, it was later that night. And they said the safest place to be was, is in the tower. They said that the footings that go deep down into the ground, like the tower extends down into the ground, like it's something like 50 or 70 feet. It's long, a long way down. Remember that stage of construction was months. Yeah, forever of nothing, just nothing looked like it was happening. The trucks come in with cement, they go back, they get more cement. It's just pouring cement in a hole. Walk through what happens. You're in the tower, there's two people up there, one on ground, one on local, and you get a phone call from downstairs, evacuate the tower. What do you, what do you do? You're in charge. Man. Well, fortunately, I think there's not a lot of traffic. Yeah. Let's assume there's nobody that's moving, nobody's on in the air and then in the tower air space. The airspace is already clean. And there's nobody moving on the ground. What are the administrative stuff? If you have time, you put announcement on the AIDAS. I mean, the airport becomes like a satellite for radar. I don't know. I've never, that's never happened. I've never been a part of that. There's something we can put on the AIDAS that says non-towered, which for those of you listening and don't know, try a tower never closes, it's open always. And we're not, we don't give the air space or the facility to another center overnight. We work all day, every day, forever. So this would be unusual. Everybody would be looking at each other going, do we just walk out of here? Like, Yeah, it is. That's super weird. I mean, just except for the COVID cleanings, name a time and date in the last 25, 30 years, there has been someone in the tower. Yeah. You're right, the COVID cleanings and those were super fast. We live that. But that was like less than an hour where we were vacated. Right. Which was probably the case on this one too. But I think we did put something on the AIDAS, the towers, you know, non-towered, but you had somebody else in another room, in another room, in the radar room at the time, saying what was going on so they could talk to the airplane. So, interesting. Well, I'm glad everybody made it out of that. Yeah. We didn't sustain any damage here, but it was very close to our house. We went north of us, or the steepest warnings were north of us. So, hey, when you were in Washington as a kid, did you do earthquake drills? Was that a thing? No. We did that as kids in California. Oh, yeah. So, being on the other side of the state from where the fault line is, there was only one earthquake where, well, I was there, that anyone felt on our side. And it was early in the morning and I was in bed. So, I don't, but friends of mine were awake, I guess. People are awake at five something. And they felt it. So, that wasn't very... We did those every year to start the year off. That was like our welcome back to school. If you know how fire drills, everybody goes outside. But earthquake drills, you had to get under a desk or a doorway somewhere that supposedly was going to protect you when the whole building collapsed. It was off to Tennessee land. Yeah. This just makes you feel better. I mean, it does. This desk with two or four little tiny little legs is gonna protect me. I guess it's better than nothing. It is. Anyway, this reminded me of that. So, shall we begin? Let us begin. All right. Since OB 428, we have some new members on the iceberg. Lima, Yankee, Julia, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Papa, and Mike Charlie are new on Supercast. And we got a PayPal drop from Julia Uniform sent an altimeter drop as a tip of the hat to OB. Thank you. If you've been enjoying the show, you can take it to the next level by joining our premium feed on Supercast. Supporters get every episode on time with no delays. Our entire back catalog access to our live stream recording, bonus audio, critically acclaimed bonus audio, and a direct line to us to our supporter only email. You'll keep the show ad free and community supported. You can learn more or sign up at opposingbases.supercast.com. Thank you, everybody. Yes, thank you. Just a review. Just a review. No announcements. It's that time of year. It's the lull and ratings were between winter and spring flying. People are taking breaks. It's understandable. Right. And this section of the show, we normally read a review, which we have one, and announcements, accomplishments and aviation. Send them our way. We'll read them on a show. What? This review. Five stars titled, Listen at 1x Speed. I'm fairly certain the host record the show and then slow it down to 1x speed. So some of us who are a bit listening challenged can get the info from our ears to our brains. However, I listened to all the episodes at 1x speed. This way I can absorb the amazing amount of information which is delivered each week by AG and RH and enjoy their robot sounds. This podcast is suitable for pilots and non pilots alike. My 79 year old mom even enjoyed 14 hours of opposing bass as well on a road trip with me. I have become a better pilot and citizen of the National Airspace System by listening to this podcast. It helped me through my instrument rating and it helps me remember every flight controllers are people too. If you need something, just ask. They'll help if they can. By Kilo Juliet. Excellent. Very good. I like it. If you are new to the show, you want to do a review, can use your fruit player and type it away on the public feed and we can see it and maybe read it on show. All right. We got it. Damn, I may be back. I'll get number one since you just got done reading that long review. Thank you. From Supercaster Delta Charlie, hello Al Fegolf and Romy, oh hotel. I've never seen it like that on my side. Right. I rather enjoyed that. Delta Charlie from outside the capital Bravo. I'm a Fifi captain for Penguin Airlines based out of the Dulles, Dulles of the capital airports. I walked right into that one. I also have a personal airplane affectionately nicknamed after a cream filled hostess snack based at the Delta LIS maneuvering area equipped towered airport under the capital Bravo. In episode 425, when you were talking about slant uniform being short for slant unable and slant whiskey being short for slant worthless, it brought up a fun memory back in the early 2000s. We're going to talk about that today by the way. It's a show topic. Back in the early 2000s before liveHTC.net existed. You remember that when we could talk on the radio and not worry about it being on YouTube at an hour? Right. Yeah, right. And then disappearing at work like 40 days after you said it. Like marking the calendar. You're like, wow, if I make it till, you know, the third of March, I'm in the clear. I used to listen to liveHTC stream out of the valley of the sun. There was an airline base there operating old 737-200s and departure controllers would routinely clear them direct to fixes those classics simply couldn't comply with. All right, the 200 is an older one. Really, really old. Okay. Most crews would dutifully come back with the standard unable direct and get a vector to join a radio for a Victor airway. But there was one pilot I heard a handful of times who had a different approach. Instead of the usual response, he'd key up and say something along the lines of unable direct or slant antique tonight. Always got a chuckle. I love that. Also, one other story about equipment suffixes. I did about 100 hours of time building in a Cessna 150 about 15 years ago that was solidly slant unable with 1.5 com radios. What does that mean? One worked half of the time and two nav radios of questionable accuracy in a Lorraine. Did you ever use that? No, there were Lorraine antennas where I grew up. You can see them forever around. Okay. That worked best when it was turned off. I'd often get clear direct destination when flying IFR when I would respond unable. They would ask if I had VFR GPS on board. And if so, what was the on course heading to my destination? I'd reply with the heading and they'd say fly heading, whatever I just told them, clear direct destination on able. I always enjoyed that elbow, elbow, wink, wink of a clearance. I love this. I never heard anybody do that because we came up kind of post GPS in ATC land. Oh yeah. What do you think of that technique? Oh, on the Army side, when we were in D models, we had no certified GPS. We lived in this little nuance. If you were, our sort of rule was if you're VMC, yes, I can go direct kind of, but we played this heading game all the time. And we would preempt instead of this back and forth. When they would say direct, we would just already know because we knew it was coming. So we would say we can't, we're unable direct, but the heading would be this. And they would just come back and say fly heading, vectors two. Okay. And now we're in compliance, we're legal. Yep. And we would check in with the next controller. We are on a vector, this heading to this fix. And then that would pretty much be the end of it. And then when you got close enough and you could navigate direct with whatever equipment you did have, you could do it. Yeah. Once we were, if it was a VOR, yeah. Once we could tune it in, yes. All right. All right. Keep up. Now, if we were in the clouds, we did not do this. Understood. I just want to be clear. We did not go play Lucy Goosey with the rules while we were in C. I'll try to summarize that rule that you're talking about without confusing. The non-aviation, you never owned an airplane and never been responsible for knowing what equipment is legal to use or not. One, the aircraft has to have a certified piece of equipment that's installed in the airplane for you to say that's what you're using to navigate. And two, right. If you don't, you need to be aware that this device that you're using, back then it wasn't iPads. There were machines that were little add-ons, moving maps. That was a short period of time before AFBs became the thing that you could use. But what I choose describing is pretty much come and clean. We can't do that because the equipment in our airplane can't go direct. But I have this little box here that can point me in the correct direction. I need this heading. Okay. Now we're back on the legal path. You can fly a heading, of course, you're an airplane or a helicopter, but you can't go direct legally with that piece of equipment that's not installed in the airplane. That was my Ted Talk on GPS. Yeah. So all it did was, there was no map. It just was a display of numbers and letters. And when you hit direct to something, it just swung the number two needle around. And it did not give you CDI guidance on that course. It just purely swung the needle. And the problem is that the database was corruptible. You could go in and fat finger in the grids for a fix and tell it something different than what it was. You had the ability to alter the database from the cockpit, which is why, no, we can't have that. Okay. So let me translate that into today's world. If you have any AFB with a moving map, let's just say four flight, it's accurate. It's going to point you in the right direction. You can get on a very direct line on the GPS that's a moving map not attached to your airplane. But if you're in a slant uniform airplane trying to do that and you file slant golf, which means you have GPS, you're in violation of the role. It needs to be in the airplane. Yeah. Your EFB is not a certified IFR navigation. No. Piece of equipment. Yeah. Okay. Delta Charlotte continues, keep up the great work on the podcast. I've seen you guys twice at Oshkosh now and have been a weekly listener since the early 200s, looking forward to if and when there is another OB fly in Delta Charlotte. Cool. Maybe we'll see you again at another one. We haven't planned one yet. We have not. Thank you. And thank you for supporting the show. You get number two. Number two from Supercaster, Juliette Micravo. Hi guys, just a bit of Australian feedback for practice approaches. In this country, we have a booking system. What? For doing air work at most towered sites where this is possible. Your reaction was exactly what I said out loud. I almost forbade them when I read this the first. Yeah. This just sounds... Go ahead. You're going to love it. You're going to love it. All right. The system is on a national website. Book AWK Air Work. I think so. Okay.com. System works really well for VFR and IFR training. I like. ATC knows you are coming and plans accordingly. I have never heard of anyone being refused entry where a slot is booked and personally have only been given a bit of vectoring to coordinate with scheduled airline arrivals. However, due to not... However, do not be early or late for the plan slot or risk wrath. Really enjoyed this series on this. Cheers from down under where it is summer and hoping your ice, not ice park, is melting fast. Love your work, Juliette Micravo. Okay. I just... Well, this feels like army to me. That's what this is something the army would do, except it wouldn't actually work. Just be a total nightmare. It just would be another layer of stuff you had to do before you went flying. Add it to my mountain of paperwork I'm already having to accomplish. Getting here an hour before I really need to to do all of this stuff and I don't know. I feel like the people in this country would not appreciate this. No. No. This effort at all. This feels a lot like Europe for me. They try to... I'm saying this with all due respect. They do a great job. It's just different. The system is totally different. Yes. They try to solve conflicts that American controllers solve airborne. They try to solve all that on the ground with very heavy metering and planning ahead like this. For practice approaches, I'm not sure if they do this in Europe, but if we tried that here, it would be a tracking nightmare because how often do you go out and actually execute what you thought you were going to do for a flight? Something happens. You're late. Yeah. You're just not... It's so rigid to think that you even had a clue. I just think back to my lessons as an instructor. We'd go out and just sometimes we would repeat the first approach two or three times because they balled up the NDB. Who didn't? It was a hard approach to do. Right. Right. So what if I had a reservation loosely translated at another airport to do a VOR approach and we never made it? Now I took somebody else's slot. American controllers would throw that piece of paper right in the trash. It's like getting that map for the for the Airwark map. Like, hey, we're going to do surveys and they give you... In the dark room, they hand you this map with all these lines on it. You're like, I don't... I don't care. Like, it doesn't help me. Right. Because in reality, where is this plane going to be? Where is it actually going to be when a jet comes off of Triad? When this... I need to descend this guy into Metroplex. This paper of lines doesn't help me accomplish any decision making other than the awareness that, hey, there's going to be a guy out here today. Right. He's going to ruin your whole session. I'd rather not know until it's... Yeah. You will use... You will end up using sickleaf tomorrow in... That's it. I'm never doing this again. The other part of your feedback saying that you've never seen anybody get denied or told no, with few exceptions, I would say that's the case in Triad-like air spaces. I've never been told no. They may suggest, like, hey, I can't do that thing right now. Let's do this other thing at this other airport. Yeah. But flat denial because there's too many airplanes. That normally doesn't happen. Even in this... That's not normal. In the thickest of GA training airspace that years ago, before all the fancy tools down in Mickey Mouse land, they never said no. You just kept going. They just kept working it out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, hats off to Australia for making this work and for having people that managed to somehow be on time and adhere to this schedule. I am just telling you, I do not think Americans would be able to accomplish this in any way. And you're right. The controllers would be the first ones to say absolutely not. Nope. Not only that, but you would... If this was like a day or more in advance and a controller could go and look and say, oh man, there's 30 guys coming out in this couple hours shift. I'm not coming in. No, you have to keep it a secret. You do. It's like when you took a break and the soup's trying to sneak in a trainee that you don't want to train. They know you don't want to train. They know you've been button heads and they don't tell you before you go on break because you may never come back. They're smart. Oh yeah. Don't let me go on break like that. They wait till you walk in the room and you go to the next position and this trainee is right next to it just sitting there. They're hiding in a dark corner. A black blanket over them. You can't see them. There's no indication that this is happening. You walk in and they're like Batman out of the corner. Poof. I'm here. Oh yeah, you're training. Will you trade me? All right. Thank you, Julie. Mike Bravo. I get number three from Supercaster Alpha Mike. Greetings again to my favorite penguin herders and all my fellow penguins. It's Alpha Mike. Mike from the tall tree Delta beneath the sourdough Bravo. I like that name. You know, before 27, you covered a question I had about squawking Mayday when you have an emergency and already have a relationship with ATC. I described a scenario in which an hapless pilot's lone engine flew west with neither them nor their airplane and the controller gave them not just a heading but an altitude, not once but twice. That was not a hypothetical scenario. Okay. The question about squawking Mayday arose in the FAA safety seminar I hosted at which my friend Charlie Romeo described the catastrophic engine failure they experienced in their high-performance single while climbing through 17,000 feet somewhere over the Golden State Central Valley. Eventually, Charlie Romeo told the controller, unable, I'm a glider. That seemed to get the point across that maintaining altitude was not going to happen until reaching zero feet above ground level. To finish the story, Charlie Romeo successfully accomplished the force landing in a field and a drainage ditch. Though the salvage company now owns the airplane, Charlie Romeo walked away with only minor injuries. Alpha, mic, mic. That's an excellent ending to that story. We were wondering if some of that story was hypothetical when the controller issued you an altitude or them an altitude to maintain. No, just as a mental exercise for us, but no, apparently not. And wow, they landed in a field in a high-performance single. I'm going to defend that controller again. Now they know it's not a twin. They heard it was a glider and that's, maybe they thought it was a twin is what I said the last time we talked about this. So, see how I'm thinking about my words before I say them? Yeah, that's while an emergency in an airplane is stressful and you have to think sometimes quickly to come up with a plan and go through all your procedures, you know, get your proper glide speed, find a place to put this airplane down, run the checklist, then communicate with air traffic control like you're trying to pace that. That's way easier said than done. On the controller side, this is just my experience, there's an instinct to respond pretty quickly and that may mean you spit out an altitude because you're above terrain or a minimum vectoring altitude and that's just what you blurt out, not really thinking, duh, they can't do this, you know. There's a little bit of, what's the word I'm looking for? A shock factor for the controller too and they resort to something that they're used to saying, it's not right, it was incorrect and it sounds like it got worked out when they said, unable, I'm a glider. So, for the controllers listening, pause and think before you blurt out something dumb and if they are near something that is going to hurt them if they hit it, aim them away from it on their way to another place to put this airplane down, like the antennas south of Triad, bad place to lose an engine and tell them to maintain 3600, I can't do that. Alright, well then turn east or west so we get away from these antennas, for example. This is where your map for your emergency obstruction map, actual altitudes of stuff, okay, comes into play. I think your point about just waiting a second is really important and there was actually a blurb in the Chinook operators manual in the emergency chapter about basically saying, look, there's only a couple of emergencies that you're going to have in this aircraft, you're on fire, transmission hot, dual engine failure, there's only a handful of things where you need to do something right now, you cannot wait. Most everything else though, 95% of your emergencies, you have time. It says, delay intuitive reactions. Just wait a minute and if it's not one of these three big ones, just slow down. I think that could really help controllers because you're right, there isn't a tendency, this thought that, oh my gosh, we got to do something right now. Well, no, you really don't. This guy's at 17,000 feet. Even without a very good glide ratio, this is going to be going on for a little bit. We're not talking like minutes to the ground. We got a while, we got a little bit of time. So, slow down, delay intuitive reactions. That line always stuck in my head. If you're a trainer and your trainee is trying to figure out what they would do in an emergency, try to simulate one, pick an airplane on the scope. This airplane just said, made it, made it, made it, I lost my engine. Just tell me what you're going to say. Okay. Practice before it becomes an emergency for the controller, something new while you're trying to think on the spot. Try to work it out beforehand. Can you plan for every scenario? No, but that's probably one that requires a little bit of calm reaction so that you don't add to the problem with the pilot. Right. Cool. Thank you all for my clinic. Yeah, very good. Fancy jam music. This week's show topic is from superhert supporter. The Badger pilot, the audio is in there. I'm ready to hit play when you are. Ooh, I am not ready. I want to know your thoughts on this, adding of the transcript so that we could keep up with this. This is on the screen for us. We're not reading that part. This is just for us. Oh, he's going to say all the things. I will look at it with new eyes now because I didn't realize that, but okay, I'm ready. One, two, three. Hey guys, it's the Badger pilot and I am a supercaster, but that status was recently put to the test in a recent episode where my beloved Cherokee was referred to as useless and worthless. Simply because she's a slant uniform. Well, she's not useless and she's not worthless. She is beautiful. B-E-A slant, beautiful. Okay, maybe I'm being a little overdramatic because even I recognize that the main thing that this plane is good for when it comes to IFR is a pop-up clearance to shoot an isle to break through a layer, not for in route IFR. Although my local Traycon swears that, at least on paper, they still know how they would work me. And they have told me that they appreciated my suggestion where on check-in, I request a specific heading to intercept one of the Victor Airways to remind them what I'm doing in the first place. But I do have hopes and dreams of soon becoming a member of the slant golf mafia, which brings me to my question. Do you guys think that sometime in the near future, say maybe in the next 20 years, a satellite-based navigator will be required to file and fly IFR? Am I one of the few out there that are still looking at flying IFR without a GPS? Or would this drastically change your world? Would you be able to start suggesting ground tracks and ground speeds instead of headings and air speeds, like you've talked about in the past as being basically impossible at this point? And what's in the future that might someday make GPS obsolete? I'd be curious your thoughts and as always, thanks for all you guys do. See ya. Got it. I got it. I'm trying to stop it. Okay, I got it. All right. Before I get your comments, I just want to review with everybody real quick. The slant comes after the aircraft type. It tells air traffic control and your FAA and the flight planning people in the world. What equipment your airplane has, slant uniform, we don't see that a lot anymore. That means you have no DME, no RNAV, which is GPS, and your mode C transponder only. You do have typically a VOR and ILS, a combination of the two or both, sometimes two VORs that was common in the slant uniforms that I flew. So you could do like sort of triangulation, you could catch radials and cross radials. We had a mode C transponder, no DME, no GPS or RNAV capability. And operationally, it means you can fly VOR airways, Victor airways, if you've never heard of those, pull open your low and route map on your EFB. Those are those black lines run ever that start with a V for Victor. And those are radials off of VORs. Those are land based navigational tools from the late 1900s. Right. You could do ILSs and VOR approach or one or the other, depending if you have a localizer or not. But you cannot fly RNAV routes, SIDS or STARS that are RNAV depicted and based, you can't fly DME required procedures. And obviously, you cannot fly GPS approaches, which are pervasive in the NAS. All right, you want to break down your initial thoughts and we'll go through these questions that he had. Do we think that sometime in the near future, in the next 20 years, a satellite based navigator will be required? No, I don't. And here's why we are maintaining, and we've talked about this before, the MON, the minimal operational network of ground based of airports and navades that are part of this network of ground based navigation. At the speed of FAA, I do not see in 20 years that network going away. Yes, some VORs are being taken out. When they fail, they don't fix them anymore because, but if they're part of the MON, which Triad, the Triad Airport is part of the MON, they are maintaining and repairing and fixing those things. The problem, I think right now with GPS, is its susceptibility to corruption jamming is a frequency, right? So it's a radio frequency that you're, that's going up and coming down and with a very simple equipment, someone can wipe out GPS signal in a huge radius. The military does not like that. Why? Right. What would they possibly be bothered by? Yeah, so if we, if my deployments to Iraq, and if, well, not so much Iraq, but most more Afghanistan was heavily GPS reliant, we could have done it without it, but it would have been a significant workload increase, significant. I mean, it's like a whole different animal now. And to have that taken away or spoofed or, you know, altered in that it's showing you, it's not disrupted, it's showing you a location, but it's incorrect is even kind of scarier. So I think, I think, just my opinion, that we're going to see a network of this stuff stick around. Because now, even now, almost every plane, there's very few, this is the exception now, this is by far the exception. Even with GA. Yeah. Everybody's got a, some sort of GPS certified GPS. Okay. Here's a great example. Even the Apaches in the army, who used to be no IFR, you cannot do go IFR at all, are now slant golf capable. Out there flying practice approaches. Okay. Let me follow up on that. Now I know you didn't train on that aircraft, but did that change the way they utilize that airplane when that equipment was installed? Did the mission type change? The combat overseas mission did not change. No. Okay. But the capabilities of moving that aircraft around, at least stateside, increased significantly. Yes. Okay. And you maintain some proficiency in that whole group of pilots was, is not a small group of pilots, that now, if you have to switch airframes, they're not starting over. Because what we would get guys that were cross leveling into Chinooks from Apaches, whose IFR skills were nothing, they had no, like they went to the sim once a year. And that's, that was like our bread and butter stateside, we went IFR everywhere. So, yeah, I don't think, no, I don't think we'll see that being required. Second question, am I the one, one of the few out there that are still looking at flying IFR without GPS? Would this drastically change your worlds? Well, with the assumption that you're, you're already an anomaly, if, you know, we kind of squash the idea that one day it'll be required, it could be, we could be wrong. I agree with you. I don't, I think we're a long ways off on that. I think the system, somebody's going to get upset for me saying this, organically, that will change without a forced move. Eventually, you won't be able to get anything without it. The aircraft that are marketable that are even older have had some sort of revision and updated interior equipment wise to make it saleable, make it something people want. Your airplane is still very useful. You bring up a very good point that having slight uniform means you have no GPS doesn't mean you can't fly IFR. You're just limited on what you could do and where you can do it. But high losses are still pervasive. They're the thing. They're going to be on a vector anyway. Yeah. So while you admit that it might not be the best enroute tool, yeah, you can't fly direct from points that are super far apart, but you can still fly routing that matches what is realistic in ATC land. You're not getting directs through Bravos anyway, even with GPS. You're still going around it on t routes, which you can't do, but you could do Victor Airways around airspace. So we joked and we apologize for implying your airplane wasn't beautiful. It's just different right now. You're not the only one. There are plenty of aircraft out there that are slight uniform. I would say it's probably less common to be on an IFR flight plan, slight uniform these days, because most of the training revolves around GPS training. And it would be something that was foreign, just like you mentioned the Apache guys that flew it once a year on the sim. A slight uniform is probably 95% of the flying it does is VFR, VFR flight plans, flight following IFRs I haven't even thought about it because I don't have GPS. Right. You happen to know that that airplane is still very useful. Say another word for you. Is that useful? So no, I don't think it would change anything if you stayed the way you are. Keep using it appropriately at the right times and controllers can kind of adapt. Some of them don't even look at your equipment code. That's why they may not realize you can't do these things. It might be a suggestion, a throw to the remarks, slight uniform, unable GPS. Right. Yeah, no GPS, unable direct, whatever kind of. Yeah, there are some controllers that would need that reminder like what does this uniform even mean? Yeah, the new guy has looked at that. Yeah, they've never seen it. Right. Like really, they had, you know, the whole concept that someone couldn't just go direct to a fix might be foreign to some, right, to some new controllers. Yeah, why are you saying fly heading joint vector? Why did you say that to this airplane? Right. Because that's the only way they can do it. Yeah. So I think for me, if I was working and maybe I didn't see this and the guy, you know, checks in and says, I say clear direct, this fix or this destination, they say, oh, we can't do that. And then I look down and I'm like, oh, well, I don't want you going that way. Fly, turn left heading vectors to and we'll just keep you on a vector. Yep. And I'll hand you off to the next facility on a vector. Yeah, and or they probably file the flight plan that works for the equipment they have, just put them on it, take away the direct amend the routing the way they had it. It might be VR to VR could be Victor aways between those VRs, whatever it is, just put them on their filed route and deal with it. Yeah. You want the next one? I like this. You're the controller, you can answer this. Would you be able to start suggesting ground tracks and ground speeds instead of headings and air speeds like you talked about in the past as being physically impossible? Well, ground speeds, I failed to check ride for flying at ground speed one time. In a helicopter, I was capable of hovering at 14,000 feet. So losing air speed is not, you know, is not really the concern here. But in an airplane, no, we're never going to sign a ground speed. Ever. That will never happen. I don't think it'll ever happen. So we use it as an advisory, hey, traffic ahead of you, you know, four miles ahead of you indicating 150 on the ground. Just as a heads up, like, hey, they're slow, they've slowed significantly, you have an overtake and usually the response, okay, we'll start slowing down. I am not assigning a ground speed, I'm just informing them what the only speed available to me is ground speed, I am just telling you. So when you look down in real life, you're doing 20 knots faster than that aircraft, it's doing 150, you're doing 170. If you want to take that information and slow your aircraft accordingly, go ahead. But you also can't control the wind. So as you descend, especially below 10,000 feet, wind direction and speed changes rapidly, it would be very difficult, even in the perfect scenario for an airplane to fly at ground speed, not to mention completely foreign to them outside of AG's creativity on a check ride, doing an approach, which is why we're doing it. We wanted to be at 90 knots and match the chart. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's genius. The examiner did not share my enthusiasm. No. No. So even if GPS was mandatory, I agree with you, I don't think this would ever be a thing. Now, the ground tracks is totally different because here's what happens. Weak, less capable controllers frequently are using cheating tools for giving vectors. Okay. And they are splat team. They're drawing a line off of your plane to a place they want you to go, reading what the heading is, and then assigning a vector within the closest five degrees of that. Okay. So they want you to go northwest bound and they say fly heading 3, 4, 5, because that's what the line on the scope shows them. What they're failing to understand is that that is a track, not a heading. And if the wind is out of the Southwest at 40 knots at 6,000 feet and you're 15 degrees correction, it's not the same thing. Right. But if I can say fly ground track 3, 45, 3, 45, I'm putting you exactly where I'm pointing on the map now. It's way more precise. Instead of evaluating, okay, let's see what that 3, 45 does. Nope, it's off. Turn five degrees left. Okay. Nope, that's off. Another five degrees left. And now we're just like homing into this, you know, into the location that I need you. A bone, we made that super simple because we are track up on our display. Not heading up. This is not a map argument. We'll talk about that later on the show. Okay. This is the way that your information is presented to you. It shows you your track is always straight up. Yeah. That is mind boggling when you've spent 25 years. Heading up. Oh. Yeah. I was just showing. I'm not even sure. We could cycle through those options. Okay. Northup track up heading up. But in the King Air, I don't think you could. I think you're right. It was heading up. It was heading up. You would have remembered. Yeah. It's dramatic. It's still every time I look at it, it's a dramatic event. Yeah, that would be confusing. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Interesting. What is in the future that might someday make GPS obsolete? Mr. Alf Vigolf? Huh. Some other form of navigation that wasn't ground based and wasn't GPS? Lidar? I don't know. Some kind of really advanced inertial nav. Some form of, some advanced form of inertial nav. I mean Lidar is unbelievably accurate. And if you can tell it, where it is, and it had a database of, you know, information that it could, as you're flying, it's scanning the ground. Hmm. It would know exactly where it was. It would be unbelievable accurate. But the amount of data that that would require in real time would be astronomical. So you would have to have some really increased, a way to increase data airborne. I can't explain how it works. We have inertial navigation in our aircraft. We rely almost entirely on GPS signals now though to navigate. That's the predominant source of information, but we do have the capability to leave point A and fly all the way to point B provided we told it exactly where it was at point A and we flew for X amount of hours and the airplane's internal navigation system is going to be able to get us there. That is the thing, but it's not for GA. I don't think that would ever be a thing. I mean, these are super expensive. The F model had two inertial nav and you had to update it periodically. It would start to drift off. And so you had to do airborne updates, like as you're flying over a point, look out, say, yep, there's that edge of that lake, fly over that, boom, hit the, right as you're flying over, hit the update, re-cage the brain of this system. And it was okay. But for IFR, like airline traffic type stuff? No. No. I don't know. That's a great question for the audience. I guarantee there's people, what was that system that, you know, we, we had discussed a while back. Remember, Kilo Kilo had sent us an article about this. Not ringing any bells. Yeah, he'll remember. Big picture on the feedback. And do you want to apologize for calling his airplane useless or undesirable? Unfun? I do. I'm sorry. You're right. I mean, I lived in that world for a long time. Slant uniform. We didn't, we weren't even slant alpha, which was just maybe a slight upgrade. I think maybe there was DME or we didn't have any of that. So I feel your pain. It, you're right. It does work for an, a pop-up IFR getting back in to the field. And ILS is still a great approach. There's still ILS is all over the place. I don't, I feel like you're not going to be outside of flying distance of an ILS. I agree. Almost anywhere on this side of the country. Fact. So it's a great tool for that. It's a good, to me, that's a good warm fuzzy. If something does go bad, the weather comes in unexpectedly. At least I know I can get back. And like I said before, you're going to be on a vector anyway. That's the first thing that's going to happen. They're going to tag you up, rate our contact, turn right heading, vector ILS. What you can do, slant anything. Right. As long as you have a heading indicator or a compass, you can do that. Right. One more thing I forgot to mention before. We have a tendency in the United States, I think everywhere in the world, we're flying airplanes that are decades old. Some of them born in the 50s or 60s in the GA world. And there's a cost-benefit analysis to putting these new systems in your airplane. When the airplane is worth less than the new system, it might not make sense. And that's totally, it's totally normal. It makes, if you keep getting the inspections and the airplane is capable and airworthy every time you do your annual inspection, keep it up, keep flying it. You don't have to go put in, I'm just throwing out numbers, total guesses. You don't have to throw in 40, 50, $60,000 systems in an airplane that on paper is worth far less than that. Especially when you have an engine overhaul coming up and it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense, especially if you're able to utilize it in IFR world and VFR world for what you need it for, keep flying it. Yeah. Anything else? No. Thank you, Badger Pilot. Yes. Your airplane is beautiful. We saw your pictures. Yeah. Yeah, we're sorry. We're very sorry. I am sorry for the pain that I caused. I do apologize. I didn't mean to laugh when you said that, but I did. All right, moving on. Be back time. All right, you get number one. Number one from Supercaster, Charlie Sierra Lea, Mahe Obie Guruz, question about checking in and communicating what the pilots were doing. If one is given direct to a fix and that fix is 500 sectors from present position, should we be checking in with direct to that fix an altitude or just the altitude as the controller knows the fix you are navigating to even if the fix is way outside their airspace? Charlie Sierra Lea, Mahe Obie Guruz. Okay, so there's a couple of, it depends on this question, just like so many questions in this industry. Let's talk about what the next controller is seeing on your strip. Okay, hopefully, if controller A, who assigned you direct to fix 500 sectors from here, amended it in the system to show that. Now, that sometimes will not happen. They forget, they get busy. I don't know why, they just don't because that would be work. And the trick on controllers don't have a quarter keyboard to do this update. It'll rely on somebody else. There's a million places that could fall between the cracks. Somebody sitting at the keyboard to actually type all of this in, who's answering the phone, whatever. It doesn't get put in. The next controller will not realize that you are direct and there could be confusion. Because if the routing on your strip flies you into one sector, the first of 500, and your direct flies you into a different sector, this is going to create a problem. It will come to a head then. Yes. Where are you going? Yeah, wait a minute. What heading are you on? What are you doing? A word directive, XYZ, that's 600 miles from here. And that controller is going to go, I have no idea where that is. So you're on that heading now. That heading you're on now is direct to that FISC. Yes. Okay. And then they're going to update you and put you on that. Once that conversation has been had, and the update, the amendment is done, and your flight strip shows that you are direct to that FISC, you don't need to tell anybody else. Agreed. The only thing you need to be prepared to do is tell them the heading. Because they should generally see your track and know, okay, it's that direction, but they may want to actually put up the line and see, is this going to go to this sector or that sector? Because they may have to update you to show you going into the right sector. Yeah, sometimes it's aimed at a boundary of two other air spaces like center and mountain to the north. And we may have to put a fix in the system to trick it so that it does flash to the correct one. Yep. I agree. You don't have to check in with the place you're going. That's really, really far away. They should have it. It should be on the strip. They should know that. And legal automation requires the controller receiving that airplane know where they're going by using the coordination fixes and the data on the strip. That's all part of the job. Yeah, that is required or verbal coordination would be required. Right. It's not uncommon. Let's say I hand an aircraft off to the center and they take it 20, 30 miles from the boundary. And now you say, hey, I see this weather or I see this, can I go direct to this fix? And I say, okay, clear direct to that fix. But now, because I don't have track control, the center has taken your data tag. I can't make an amendment anymore. It's not yours. It's the center's now. Right. So I do have to call now and say, hey, for whether they're direct to X, Y, Z. And then the center just, I think even me just speaking it into the landline just makes an amendment in the system at the center. I think that's how easy it is there. Agreed. All right. That was a good one. Somebody in the background at the center says, hey, does that guy need to be on this routing? And the computer chimes in and says, would you like to execute that routing? They have AI integrated keyboard entries. Yes. Transmit to pilot question mark. I would love, yes, please. Yes, computer. Yes. All right. Number two from Penguin, a few episodes back, there was a story about a pilot who was on flight following but did not respond to their calls. A couple of months ago, I was flying out just enjoying the day. I was headed to the Hudson to do a skyline tour, but Newark could not take me. It was at the later end of the long government shutdown. So I don't blame them, but probably should have thought of that ahead of time. Oh well, no big deal. I'll just fly somewhere else. I'll tell them I'm turning around and approach sends me back to the Treycon. Now I've got a 30 minute stretch of nothing but straight line flying. I know I'm getting close to handoff boundary, but the call never comes. No big deal. They'll switch me when they switched me. I start to hear them talking for someone who isn't answering. I've got nothing to do this stretch. So I start looking for this pilot. I check guard on com two. I check other local frequencies. I check my iPad. Nothing. I hear that they're looking for them going in the same destination as I am. So I hop over to the CTAF on com two again, looking for this other aircraft. I never find them. I finally get to switch over to high roller approach. So I acknowledge and switch. I check in with high roller approach and they respond. November one, two, three. How do you read me? That's an odd question. I think five by five. I respond. They then ask November one, two, three. What happened back there? It now dawns on me. It's me. I'm the missing idiot. I'm looking for myself. I love this. Did I mention this is my first time solo in the new club plane? I had one check out previously in the spine and the call sign was apparently just not clicking for me yet. I had no issues tracking the call sign on the first leg up to New York. And while on with busy New York approaching back, but at some point on the next leg, I heard a similar call sign on frequency and I guess my brain shut off that pattern of letters and numbers for a while. I explained the similar call sign through me and they were just happy to know I was fine and the flight went normally. Anyway, the episode reminded me of the story and I thought I would share. Papa Sierra. I love that. Here's what I do because I'm notorious as the non-flying pilot monitoring to miss radio calls. So the second we get in the plane, I print out a little piece of paper from our fancy printer. It's pretty cool. And I fold it in half so it fits on the yoke clip. And I write, I even write the, I write Penguin first and then the number. The number is not good enough because apparently being a controller and saying all the things, you might forget what company you work for. So I write it, the whole thing is written out. Right. Right. So every time I hear a radio call, I look at the yoke, or is it me? Is it me they're looking for? You're laughing. I'm telling you, that's what I have to do. No, I don't. It just reminds me of that time. We were taxiing out with no side tone in the VHF and the two pilots in the cockpit making radio calls to each other. Thinking there's another aircraft out there. Like, man, I don't remember anybody else on the schedule. Who is out here? And it's foggy. You can't see. You're being careful. Right? Yeah. It's dark. I can't see him talking. I can't hear him talking. And the flight engineer just says, you two idiots are talking to yourself. Oh, oh, oh. Yeah. All right. So get a sticky note, dad, and put it on the yoke because there might not be a clip in your airplane, especially if you're flying club airplanes that aren't yours. The people who own airplanes or fly the same one all the time, they're wondering how you could possibly do this. Trust me. This is going to change the way I try to reach out to planes, though. And this is what's going to happen. I'm going to say, attention all aircraft. Please direct your attention to the call sign placard that's on your desk right in front of your face on your instrument panel. If it says November one, two, three, please call me. You are the person I would like to speak to. I think it's great that you went on other frequencies looking for this airplane. No, it's wonderful. Thank you for sharing this really for just admitting it. Yes. We've all done stuff like this. And we just thank you for sharing this story and for letting us enjoy it. And letting me read that. Thank you. You get number three. Number three from Supercaster Tango Golf. Hello, hello, R.H. and A.G. Penguin Club member from the Redneck Riviera Delta. In episode 409, you suggested that only crazy penguins with the bird flu, which is to have our navigators or iPads with Northup rather than track up. Okay. This is, I'm taking my hat off for this. We're going to get serious here for a second. All right. This made me question every major decision I have made in my life. Good. I then pulled friends who were mixed following or who were mixed followed by throwing it up on airplanes and coffee chat on the old Facebook. Okay. So they put up a, they put up a poll. As you can see, essentially even split with 644 responses I'm middle age, assuming I live to be 114 and I have been a pilot since sometime in the 1900s. When I flew with a sectional and I was headed south, I did not turn the map upside down. Did you? Yes. Yes, I did. A younger pilot friend, track up loser, suggested this may be old versus young issue. With age comes wisdom, Northup for life. Cheers. Thanks for all you do for aviation tango golf. For those of you who want to take a sound bite, please do not take that sound bite. AG never said those. He was reading those words off the page. Northup for life, cheers. Was from the reader or the listener, not AG. Go ahead. Yeah. Right. Thank you. Yeah. I was just reading the words. Northup is, it is a sickness. It is an unwelness for which therapy and counseling is available. Your map should be oriented the way that you are oriented to the earth. Track up makes way more sense because if it is not, you are looking at it, if you are flying south, okay, and you have got the thing turned around 180 degrees, now you have to look at everything backwards and interpret it. You are having to flip it all around in your brain. I just, maybe from 5500, 7500 feet in a Cherokee on a sectional, it makes sense. Maybe you can make it make sense. It is, you know, you are seeing a lot. It is not moving really quick, but in our world of being 1000 feet and below, this would not, you could not be going around with Northup. No, I don't think so. All right. I just don't think so. I mean, just take it from from a group of pilots historically that I would argue might be among the best. I am not including myself in that because I did not do this for my entire career. I did a ton of GPS, non-paper map navigation. Okay. But the army in general, and I am talking about people that flew 50 feet off the trees in Vietnam in the middle of the night on a 1 over 50,000 map. A sectional is what, 250,000? 250,000? Okay. So you are down like, you could see like cemeteries, okay, on a 1 over 50,000 map. Okay. These people did not fly with Northup. They flew with TrackUp. The best people at paper map navigation in the world as a body of pilots, I would suggest, flew with TrackUp. I am going to muddy the waters here. Because it is an old versus new, I think, with a moving map that can, you can flip a map to TrackUp and the words will be read correctly. It doesn't turn the map upside down on a moving map. So EFBs, you can navigate with TrackUp and it will work. Try it one day. It does make it easier to look outside and correlate what is on the map. I will defend TrackUp. I think it's, I will, but I can also defend Northup in certain cases. Or TrackUp on the screen in front of us, whatever is fixed to the airplane, I've never flown a plane that didn't have TrackUp as the map that's being displayed. It's, now it doesn't have fancy pictures like a VFR sectional would, but the fix that's next is up on the screen. It's forward, straight, going that way. On the side where I have my iPad up, we have several pieces of technology that show us big picture weather, turbulence. You can also make those TrackUp if you want, but now I've turned my head and I'm looking outside, I'm looking in another direction. I'm not looking at where I'm going. I'm looking at something that provides me with information. I normally have that on Northup because when I pinch and zoom and move all around, that's just the way my brain operates. I'm looking in the direction we're flying for hazards. I'm moving the map around with a Northup philosophy like I would if I was in a planning room. That makes sense. That makes sense. But for navigating, I did. Back in the day, when we didn't have moving maps in these 152s, 172s I was training in, we moved. We had a little sectional that we folded into some origami art work. And we turned it all the time. Yeah, upside down, words upside down. It doesn't matter. I wanted to see bodies of water and towers and what's direction they were in relation to me moving forward. So yeah, we turned the map. Now was it perfect? No, because you had to, you understood the area and became familiar. We're flying the same 30 mile radius the whole time for years. But in your example, it'd be very difficult to navigate that zoomed in. You're talking about a map that is extremely zoomed in. Yeah. If you have it on Northup. So if you've never flown, track up. If it's on your yoke, GA pilots listening, if you have a moving map on your yoke that's on a fancy holder, put it in track up one day. It's going to change how you think about what's around you. I'm just throwing it out there as a suggestion. I'm in the track up camp. Yeah. Yeah. So putting Northup, like you're talking about for big picture stuff, does make it easier to reference it in terms of how you would talk to air traffic. Hey, we need to turn Northwest bound. That might not be as obvious when you're looking at track up. A 30 degree left turn is makes sense. Hey, we need 30 left for this build up. But saying, yeah, we'd rather go Northwest of this cell versus Southeast of it, makes more sense when you're Northup. It orients it that way and it orients it the way air traffic has seen it because every air traffic scope is Northup. So you could talk that language a little bit easier, but for purely for navigating, I cannot imagine. I just am trying to put my head in that mode like at lower altitudes where your relative speed over the ground, just your perceived speed is quicker. I cannot imagine having Northup. It just would be, it would get super confusing. Try it one day. It's different for every application. If you're navigating around weather and you have a map that's on your yoke, it's going to help you a lot to be track up. Just say it, try it one day. You're going to love it. But yeah, I think, I just look at your example, your whole fleet, track up. I would suggest your entire airline. Yeah, oh yeah, the whole, everybody's on the fixed equipment in the aircraft is a track up. That's the end of the argument. I mean, the Pinnacle professional pilots in the world. Well, hold on. We're doing IFR flying at altitude where we're not navigating around towers and lakes and we're not doing VFR flying. I think this argument is really going to ring in with VFR pilots. Who needs the map? I would say it's more relevant for them. For the airline? No, for the, it's more important for them to do it, to do track up. I agree. It's just making the argument even stronger. Even people that don't need it to be that way. It's not as critical. Like in the King Air, we're flying around on a black map. No map. It's just a black screen with lines. Same as ours. It could be however you wanted it really, and it's track up. Because that's the way I'm going. I'm going this way. Let the debate continue. We're going to move number four to next week because we're running long and I don't want to start a new one today. So Alpha Fox Trot, thank you for your patience. We're going to move you to 430. We haven't done that in a while. We apologize. Our producers are terrible people. Yeah. We got on a couple of topics on this show that, you know, it's good. It's okay. I'm going to scroll down. Anything on this one before we close up? I'm not. Somebody's going to say, I got upset. I'm angry, you know, or I'm being like, I'm not. Obviously, it's a preference. And there's half of the people out there that clearly have a problem. Okay. And it's okay. It's okay. The first step is admitting it and knowing that there is help. There could be help. I was in track up the other day and someone asked me in the airplane, how did you do that? How did you make the screen do that? Because it defaults to north up until you hit the little compass on the upper right, Mavari FB, and then it goes to track up. You have to be moving for that to work. Yeah. Which we were. And you saw like gray hairs turn back to color, wrinkles dissolve off of their face. They just became young over just visibly younger. They loved it. They loved it. All right. We do our best to respond or support our feedback and let you know when you'll be on an upcoming show. Sometimes we tell you'll be on a show, no movie to the next week. And we say, sorry, A.G., anything to add before the chat? No. Closing out episode 429 of Opposing Bases air traffic talk, Romeo Hotel. And Alpha Golf. Goodbye, everyone. Drop. Opposing Bases is a listener supported ad free weekly podcast. The views expressed on the show do not reflect the opinions or official positions of the FAA or Penguin Airlines. Episodes are for entertainment purposes only and are not intended to replace flight instruction. To get on time access, bonus content, and full archive access, join the crew at opposingbases.supercast.com. Yeah. Drop.