OB419: Compounded Lostness

the most loss I ever got or I would see people get was when you flew that first leg, you got to where your first fix was supposed to be and you didn't see this thing, this landmark, right? But you're like, oh well, let's just do the next leg and start the timer and turn to the heading. No. Nope. It's called compounded lostness. Now it's getting worse. 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 FAA, 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 course officer at Penguin Airlines, Romeo Hotel. It's Tuesday, January 6th, 2026, episode 419. On today's show we'll discuss old school nav logs, share more wisdom on icing and prove helicopters can reach 2000 feet AGL. What's up, AJ? Hello, hello everyone. Happy New Year. Yes. We've made it to 2026. Yes. Our ninth year. We could say our ninth year now. We're in our ninth year. Mm-hmm. Hmm. That's unbelievable. I've gained about 152 pounds this last couple weeks. Wow. Eating must stop at the pace that I'm eating. Is there a size limit? A size limit to pilot at Penguin Airlines. There must be a cutoff, right? A point at which... No? Okay. No. I mean, I suppose the limiting factor immediately would be your uniform. If you can't fit in it, you're going to have a problem going to work. Uh-huh. So I guess that's self-regulated though. But you would get a new uniform, maybe. Yeah, but it's like if it happened on Friday when I go back to work, I would... It's too late to get a new one. Yeah, right. So... Sort of. You got to kind of plan ahead. Uh, is there a limit? If you can hold a medical, I suppose not. Okay. All right. Now, you go, people watching the airport, you'll see all sizes and shapes. Yeah, but you don't see all sizes. True. Yeah, there are... That's not typical. Yeah, I mean, you see some... Look, if I keep... ...an extra, maybe a little extra. If I keep eating like this, I will be the test. It must slow down. How has your last couple weeks been? Uh, good. Relaxed, sort of. I've had some time off. Breaks. Excellent. Yeah. And your... This is my last week of normal schedule, and then I go into my new 410 schedule. Hmm. Isn't that funny how we would call whatever you've been doing for the last 15 years normal? Normal. Yeah, that's not normal. Right. But you're going into a new normal. A new normal? I have no overtime scheduled this month. I love that. That's crowd noise being played. And I have been welding yesterday and today. Hmm, what are you building? A little table for my daughter's record player. Hmm, cool. Did the bed get installed? The one that was the gift? Yes. The room was cleared out by teenager? Yes. The room was made. Old bed disassembled. It's currently sitting in my garage. If anybody wants it. Okay. If you're in the area, please come and get it. Hmm. It's a twin. I'm not going to make an ad for it. But anyway. Yeah. I forgot how to fly, which is good because I go back to my current training in less than a month now. I go back. I'll be out in training land in the winter training land again. Hmm. Where I'm sure they'll be happy with my flying skills. Take a guess. Maybe I told you this. Maybe it's not really a guess. I landed the airplane how many times in 2025? Ooh. Day landings were. Ooh. 17. Correct. Hmm. Night landings were less than that. How many would you have had to have? I'm guessing that's how many. Night and there's in the same in 121 world. It doesn't matter. Oh. So there is no number. Oh. I had four of those. Yeah. I was going to say it was a single digit. So for a total of 21. Look, look everybody. What I'm trying to say is I they do let me fly. I am pilot. I'm not just an observer and bed maker. All right. I do things. I have very important jobs. Hey, you don't have to. You don't have to justify it to us. In 2026, my goal is to be in the flying seat more than 21 times. How about that? I think that's a reasonable goal. All right. That's my wish you luck. New year's resolution then. Okay. Shall we begin? Let us begin. Since OB 417, I'm sorry, 418, we have a ton of new supporters on the iceberg. Charlie Bravo, Mike Charlie, Mike Hotel, Charlie Mike, Golf Echo, Charlie Juliet, Hotel Alpha, Alpha Mike, Juliet Romeo and Sierra Charlie. Welcome. And we got to pay a pal drop from golf. Mike, if you've been enjoying the show, you can take it to the next level by joining our feed on Supercast. Supporters get on time episode releases with no delays. Our back catalog access to our live stream bonus audio and a direct line to us through our supporter only email. You'll keep the show ad free and community supported. You can sign up at opposingbases.supercast.com. Thank you everybody. Yes, thank you. Review and announcements. Would you like the review? The review titled The Greatest Show on Earth, Five Stars. Well, and there's a little giveaway in here. A secret knowledge inside knowledge giveaway. You have to listen. The Greatest Show on Earth. Well, at least the greatest podcast on Earth. While there are no lions, tigers or bears, there are plenty of penguins, knowledgeable flightless birds representing important information that might otherwise have abandoned your iceberg and cockpit in your moment of need. R H N A G are the ringmasters who explain the three ring circus of the national airspace system. It's beneficial to both sophisticated users of the NASA and Neophytes alike. Listeners will gain an understanding of the symphony of activities that is the reality of pilots and air traffic controllers in the national airspace system by patron Echo Sierra of the US and a. Mm hmm. Very good. I missed your what you were talking about before the review. The little clue. What did I miss? You missed it. I don't want to give it away. I just was. Okay. There is a theme and a an inside story that happens on the show. Mm hmm. Almost every show it's referenced. People constantly ask. What it is about. What does that mean? Why do you say that? Mm hmm. There was a hint at that in this review. Excellent. Okay. You're right. I agree with that. Okay. Okay. Good. May I get the announcements now? Okay. All right. Number one, this is administrative migration pricing for patrons moving over to Supercast is officially closed that ended on 1231. Many of you moved over the last week. Thank you. Patrons will transition to your monthly model on February 1st. If you are unsure of what's happening, it's probably because you missed the email. It's a lot of emails, which I understand. Check out your inbox and you'll be up to speed. Yeah, there's like 300 of them. We've been trying. We've been trying to get you. We want to say take a moment to say thank you, whether your support is on Supercast or Patreon or just by listening and sending in feedback. The show exists because of you. We've said it before, but it's worth repeating without our supporters and the questions, the stories, the conversations they bring to the table. So would be gone. It wouldn't be here anymore. It would not be here. You're the motivation behind every episode, the source of every discussion we have and the backbone of this community. And we want to say thank you. Yes. Yes, very much. Thank you. You want to get the second one? The second announcement. Hello, OB team. I'd like to congratulate my previous flight instructor, November Tango Charlie for joining Penguin Airlines as a new FO. Congrats. Very good. She is at her favorite, or she, well, maybe her favorite, she is at her forever airline, your patron and now Supercaster Delta Delta. Awesome. Well, congrats. Excellent. Very nice. Thanks for sending that. Thank you for sharing the news. All right. Moving on. Time to make feedback. We are not doing a trolley office segment. Stay tuned though for the show topic because it's very relevant. So if that counts towards your bingo board, there you go. Okay. There are, there's only one of these time we feedbacks today. My word. I'm just scrolling down for the first time seeing this nav log. Oh, it's amazing. I think you're going to love it. I feel like you're going to be happy with it. I am. But also, it's giving me mild anxiety. Cool. Number one from Supercaster Bravo, Juliet's here. Greetings. Most excellent purveyors of penguins. The great discussion and O before 18 about flying and icing conditions reminded me of my own icy learning experience. Many moons ago, this was back when I was flying freight in a 208, a caravan to eight. Those airplanes can carry a lot of stuff. That's a great airplanes. They used to use those at many purple box. Yes. They probably still do. We had like four of them go out every morning. Right. Yeah. And two ATRs that were always a conflict with each other. Always. Yeah. The caravan is certified is certified for flight into known icing conditions and has undergone many improvements over the years. Modern caravans have a TKS fluid anti-icing system and have been equipped with ever increasing amounts of horsepower. These changes have been necessary because even with the caravan remains my favorite airplane. It does have the annoying tendency to make ice like it's preparing to serve drinks. Wait a minute. A tendency to make ice. I think it's got larger surface areas maybe for it to say let's let's make ice here on this part of the airplane. Oh, it accumulates. Yeah. Yes. Okay. The caravan that I flew had pneumatic boots everywhere, even the cargo pod, an electrical heated prop, and a hot plate on the windshield. The aircraft was well equipped for icing conditions and very well maintained by the company. Even with all this, we were trained from day one that de-icing equipment only allowed us to safely exit icing conditions, not to fly into them and stay there. The problem which I learned firsthand is that severe icing encounters are often indistinguishable from light icing encounters until it is too late. Great lesson. Yes. Sadly, you had to learn this, but you're allowed to send this feedback, so it must have worked out. Right. One day when flying the caravan, I started picking up what appeared to be light rhyme ice. As usual, I performed the icing checklist, requested hire from air traffic, and started the climb. Unlike the scores of icing encounters I had to date, this time felt very different. The plane was sluggish to climb. I needed max continuous power to eke out a few hundred feet per minute. Any other day I would have been rocketing up to altitude, but that day my performance was frighteningly degraded. I just want to say I got through that last phrase there. That was hard to read. Yeah, there was a lot of hard words all stacked up. Yep. Clearly, much more ice had accreted somewhere in the airframe. I didn't see if I had waited before attempting to exit. My only option would have been down. Maybe not in a good way either. My destination was warm, so any ice had melted by the time I parked. The return was normal. I never learned exactly what happened, but I was reminded how tricky and dangerous icing can be. Every icing encounter seems benign until it suddenly isn't. The penguin has a full head of gray hair. Blue Sky Emperor Captain Bravo Julietz here from the Ford Trimotor Airport south of the Deep Dish Bravo, where we acknowledge no other pizza capitals. Okay, now I said I apologized and said as many things as I could before I met anybody mad last, there was a couple episodes ago. We talked about the pizza capital of the world. Did they say the world? That's quite a claim. Of the US at least, I guess. Either way, they claimed some sort of superiority over other places that claim to have a pizza knowledge and a pizza base. I did not mean to start a war, but I looked up that town. I was right. It was in Connecticut. The one that they were referring to. I'm not saying which one is better. Now, these are polar opposite types of pizza. Yes. Almost like you shouldn't call them in the same category. They're just different. The one we're referring to here in this feedback is more like a form of pie or a salt cake. I worked very hard not to upset anybody. You don't think we'll be putting in that effort? No, no, no. I'm not upsetting. I'm just saying it's more akin to what you traditionally think of as a thicker sort of food item, a bread, lots of bread. Yes. I like it though. I've been there several times. I've eaten it. I do like it, but I'm going to tread on both of these places. Okay. In that it's pretty tough, I feel like, to be the pizza capital of anywhere when pizza didn't, when pizza started somewhere else. There are a people currently inhabiting the earth that have been making pizza for way longer than any of these places. Yes, but that's typical America. We claim everything as our own after a few hundred years. Right. No, we did. No reality. Yes, we started that. All right. Very good. Anything else on that? I do like the caravan. I love the caravan. How much? No, we're good. We're totally good. I do like the caravan. I feel like it's maybe like the Toyota Land Cruiser of the sky or I don't know. Yeah. You can max it out with volume before it probably reaches anything close to its weight limits. Yes, it's very hardy. Mm-hmm. Some fun airplane to work. It was versatile. It was versatile. It could go fast until you needed it to slow down and then it could go very slow. Very slow, not extremely fast. I mean, it's a fixed gear, you know, high wing, but it does have a tremendous amount of horsepower to overcome all that drag. It was not unreasonable to expect a hundred and eighty knot ground speed and more in a descent, obviously. Oh, yeah. Learning to manage that when you descend a plane and when you want speed out of them as a controller is something new controllers should think about. When do I want to start this plane down? Because I want to be able to utilize that additional speed. Hopefully you're getting some additional speed out of the descent. Mm-hmm. But yeah, a good plane to work. Yes. Thank you for sharing your icing lesson. It's a good one for everybody, regardless of if it's equipped or not. Your plan should involve getting out of it as quickly as possible, not experimenting on what happens if I stay in this longer. Yeah, no, bad. See, that was the other thing I wanted to say. Every time you start accumulating icing, it could be in some different way that has never been done and you instantly become a test pilot in the new aerodynamics of this plane. Mm-hmm. Just like Bravo Giuliet-Sierra mentioned here, I'm at max continuous and I'm barely climbing. Something has been clearly has been affected and you don't exactly know what it is. That is like test flying a plane. So anyway, that's all. Well, thank you for making us have a pizza discussion too. Yes, fancy jet music. All right, this week's show topic is a result of the Charlie Alpha Challenge flying using old school pilotage, no GPS, no breadcrumbs, just your plane, a map and your eyeballs. You want to get it? Sure. All right. This is from Supercaster Sierra. I've been listening for over a year, new Penguin Club member. I signed up a day before my instrument check ride, hoping to send in the announcement immediately after I passed low and behold, I had to discontinue because of weather. Hopefully that can be finished here in the next week or two. I absolutely love the show and either way, I'm excited to be a part of this community. Cool. Well, welcome and thank you for your support. Mm-hmm. And best of luck on your check ride if it hasn't happened already. I want to recount a story from my private pilot training that I believe qualifies as completing the challenge given in OB409. To start, all my training was done in a Piper Tomahawk, 100% analog and I did not have foreflight until the last one-third of my training. I did everything on paper. Excellent. Mm-hmm. My instructor must have decided that he needed a laugh because he planned on our first cross country trip was going to be the night cross country trip. I was very excited for the experience and I had just studied up on how the eyes work and the different illusions that could happen at night. I was feeling very confident to say the least. The night came. I had my nav log ready. I don't have the original plan from this flight, but I'll include a picture of a different cross country nav log that my instructor sent me on. I'm going to put that up on the screen. I showed up with my paper sectional chart, my super fancy knee board and my very important red headlamp because that is what the book and my instructor said is best. I can kind of maybe see where this is going. We pre-flighted, briefed the route and my VFR checkpoints, then departed, reaching my first checkpoint and following my timer, I looked down at my nav log to verify that I was in the right spot at the right time. After verifying that I was correct in my calculations, my instructor took away my nav log and asked if I could make it to my destination without my nav log, just using the sectional chart. I was eager to try it, but I made a tough realization that it seemed like the entire map disappeared when I looked at it with my trusty red headlamp. The betrayal I felt. Yes, red light does something very weird to how you see color. My instructor watched and laughed as I floundered around the cockpit as I tried to get my sectional folded in a good way so that it didn't cover up all my instruments and the windshield. I successfully and relatively efficiently navigated to my destination airport. While I was bitter about this for a little while because I knew better and more accurate technology existed, I was very appreciative of this experience. Using a paper nav log in a sectional is how I navigated on my other cross countries until my solo when I finally invested in four flight. This was an eye-opening tool that I absolutely loved and thought to myself, how could this ever fail? It's incredible. How could it fail? I ate my words, went on my private pilot check ride. The DPE deviated me to a new airport. I looked down to my iPad thinking of how easy this was going to be with this new fantastic technology at my fingertips. Oh boy, was I humbled on that hot summer day and I had looked down to my iPad only to realize it had overheated and was literally of no use to me. I threw it in the back of the plane and thankfully I had my paper chart and successfully completed this task. Yeah, this is just so much joy wrapped up in this. I apologize. This was a very long story but I am very grateful for the high expectations of my instructor and the skills he taught me. I am totally okay if you decide to use none of this. I want to share it with someone and I want to let both RH energy that I am learning, I want to let you both know that I am learning just as much by following along and listening to everything I can. Cool. Excellent. Great reading. I have an avalogue on the screen just to bring back some memories or reasons to see your therapist. Yeah. It took me a bit. I had to go back and kind of reteach myself to left to right, the true course, the wind correction angle, all the things to make sense of it but it doesn't take long for it to come back. You remember East is least, West is best. Do you remember that? Uh huh. Uh huh. That's in there. And that minus 13. I don't know where that is in the US. I think it's probably very far northeast. Bostonish, Maine maybe? I have to look at a chart. Go ahead. This particular one that we're looking at here. Uh huh. It's just a straight line. It is. There's no turning. Yeah. All right. You could have done one but you wouldn't have any checkpoints so there's something there. Your checkpoints are in the middle of this thing. You have. You drew a line. You said, okay, I'm going to pick some of these places along. Okay. It looks like there's fixes or radials which you can't really see in real life. Maybe there's something on the map that identifies itself on these radio fixes but you're right. They just drew a straight line. If you were teaching a private student today, hey, we're going to do a cross country. It's going to be 200 miles, daytime on the east coast. What would you use for checkpoints? Assuming they're going to be between 3,000 and 6,000 feet. Up down at Helicopter Tree house altitudes. Okay. Up higher. What would I use for checkpoints? I mean airports are always good. Those are pretty easy to see. They rarely move or change location. Easily identified. Yeah. The large bodies of water. I agree with that. Those rarely move. Sometimes they get bigger. That only helps. It's good. Those are good, I think, big picture type of items. Airports and bodies of water. If there is any sort of identifiable terrain, a mountain peak is good. But if you think, oh, I'll notice this high point on a chart, not really. Not unless it's an actual peak of a mountain. Towers seem like a good idea. Better at night, but terrible during the day because you can't really see them. Yeah, you got to be right up on them. Really? Yeah, night is better. All right. So I took a couple notes down here that I wanted to talk about on this because it did bring me down a memory lane. All of my initial training was in an airplane without GPS. I know. It's crazy. My introduction to the floor flight was really not until right before I went back to the airlines. So it would have all been amazing. And I would have thought the same thing you did. This is amazing. How did we ever fly without this amazing piece of technology? And then the battery died or it got overheated, which happens to everybody. That's normal. Yes. I think the biggest difference for me thinking back is my flying then compared to my flying now is how much more I looked outside and cared about what was going on outside the airplane. VFR or IFR, when you have a moving map and all these things to look at, all these points of information, your exact location, which is really what you're looking outside for, you tend to spend a lot more time inside. So flying without this technology that we have today is a lot different. You are spending, you should be spending about 80% of your time looking at things, flying heading based on, yes, what your compass says, but you're aiming at these landmarks that you picked out in this VFR cross-country world, which must have worked because you had these pieces of technology fail. One, the map, when you couldn't see any of the points. And second, when your iPad went out, so you had an ability and a skill to use outside cues to fly the airplane. What are you laughing at? You said that, it reminded me of a time where someone was navigating on a sectional and it was in the summer and the window was open and it got sucked right out of the helicopter. What did they do? You're kind of screwed, really. Hey, did you bring your map? No. I'm not the map guide today. I don't have a map. Where's your map? It went up. Well maybe the flight engineer caught it as it went by. Oh, right. I didn't realize the chart thing. I hadn't remembered. That wasn't something that I recalled instantly. Do you remember that happening when you used, what did you use for inside the airplane lighting? Not red. Definitely not red. Red was blinding to the goggles. Way, way brighter. So we used like a blue-green, which presented its own problems, but was better than red. If you were in a permissive environment, a dim white light was preferable. But you didn't really want to do that in a non-permissive, as the army would call it, a non-permissive environment. Meaning you couldn't have lights on? One in which there are people on the ground who would like to terminate you, who would like your life to end. That's a non-permissive. Okay. Understood. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about this navlog, because I thought it would be a good chance to, we're not going to go through and show everybody how to do one, but it's a left to right read. That's how I taught it. So go ahead and you want to start us off. You have enough visual here to do a lesson on the fly? Yeah, I think so. For those of you that can't see and maybe have never done a navlog, which I guess is possible. That's a thing. I think I saw Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford Ford of your flight plan. Now in this particular one we're just in a straight line. Right. And we've sort of broken it up into different lengths but typically the way this would happen is at a at a fix or some nav point you would change direction. Right and aim towards another one. Yes and go towards another one. The point of the nav log was to give you some idea of the heading. Of course you would have to determine a wind correction. Mm-hmm. What should they do here? We can see that here in this. It's a whole degree off. It's a whole degree. So you know strategically if you're being evaluated a straight line directly into the wind provides or with the tailwind provides the best opportunity for not making mistakes. If you're going perpendicular to the wind your correction is much higher and there's much more room for error. Mm-hmm. Hint hint to the students out there. Mm-hmm. Why do you plan all these east-west? Well, great question examiner. I don't fly north on the east coast. Yeah. Yeah. So it gives you your course, your true course. Mm-hmm. Not corrected for wind. Your altitude and then the wind direction and velocity and then you have to do a calculation. I'm guessing maybe it was done on the whiz wheel. Mm-hmm. The U6B. Yes. Mm-hmm. To determine the correction for the wind, airspeed, the temperature, etc. And let's see. Yeah. So then based on your correction it gives you your true heading that you're actually going to fly and based on the distance, your heading, your ground speed, you determine a time that it's going to take between these checkpoints. So hold on. You skipped all I'll make it quick. You skipped a little step here. That's the hard part to wrap your head around as a student. You have to turn this true course, which is you putting a straight compass on a map. You have to convert to magnetic, which involves some subtraction in addition. And all that's to do is to get you to a magnetic compass heading that you're going to fly to stay on this line you've drawn on this map. That's it. Yeah. I didn't want to get two in the weeds. I did it quickly. Okay. Right. So just know that basically the point of all of that is to determine you're in the plane. What heading do I fly and for how long do I fly it? Exactly. Okay. So I do that. Let's say it's in this case, compass heading 326, which is your correction because that makes your magnetic course 327. And it's going to take 15 minutes. Right? Yep. That's what they have on here is the estimated time and route ETE. And you would fill in the other blocks as you were going because they're actual time arrival, actual time and route. Yep. You're going right. So okay, so you're going to fly a 326 heading for 15 minutes. You're going to start a timer, you know, from your desk, from your departure. Go on this heading, get to your time and then turn to your next heading. In this case, it doesn't change, but you're going to reset your time because now this next leg is 60 minutes. And then what you're going to be doing is looking for whatever this fix is, where you're going. In this case, it looks like a VOR and Highway 145. Okay. That's what that is. Okay. Yeah. Roads are good. We didn't talk about that. Roads are in Highway intersections or prominent points of the bigger road or you're crossing a perpendicular to a road. That's a great checkpoint. I interrupted. Sorry. Go ahead. No, it's fine. So then you go to the next point and you go this heading for this amount of time. And we would do flights where you did nothing but this. You sort of could back yourself up by looking out and looking on the map and looking out and saying, yep, this is where I am. But you were evaluated purely on flying this nav log and seeing how close you were at the end. How close did we get? How off were you? So, but yeah, this was a tool to help you navigate, obviously, a nav log based on time distance heading. Right. Dead reckoning at its core. Yeah. I did this. I flew for this long. This is what the forecasted wind was. I'm seeing my checkpoints and I got there, you know, plus or minus. You guys had much tighter timeframe than civilians that are in a permissive environment. Permissive, yes. When you were going on what state you're flying over. Yeah. When you were going places, how important was time? Sometimes very important. Very important. Okay. Give me an example. Don't be early. Don't be early. You mean you don't want a signal to the bad guys that your ride is here? The helicopter waiting for people to come back? Well, there is that. But sometimes there was what was called preparation of the battlefield. Okay. Where someone is dropping ordinance or they're dropping 155 rounds. You don't want to be there when they're doing that. Don't be early. Okay. Yeah. Don't be late. The standard that we had adopted for my last deployment was plus or minus 30 seconds. Yeah. Okay. If that were the standard in private pilot, check ride world, we would have no private pilots. Now we cheated because we had extensive, you know, help from the helicopter. Right. Computers that could say you want to arrive here at this minute, fine. This is the speed you got to go. And not only that, but you take off, you fly your first leg, it determines the winds. It tells you what the wind readout is. You update that into the flight plan. It says, okay, new. This is your new speed. Not only does it tell you, it just does it. Oh, okay. You tell it, I want to arrive at this time and it slows down or it speeds up. Now, the thing you had to be careful about was, okay, let's say I planned this to fly this at 120 knots, but now the wind is much higher than you thought. You can't overcome the deficiency. So we always planned it at low, at slower speeds like 110, 105, so that you could make up that difference if you had to. But yeah, I mean, there was some planning involved to get you in the right ballpark. But then once you took off and got real world data, man, it was, you were pretty spot on. The rest of this nav log talks about fuel burn and, you know, that's an important part of nav log is making sure you depart with the correct amount of gas. They wrote a little note up here. I think the required fuel was like 12 minutes, or 12 gallons. It's a smaller plane. There's some radials in there, some extra notes, like extra ways to identify each fix. But the big picture point of this log on, especially during your check ride, when they're testing your ability to make one of these and actually depart and get on your course line that you drew out is your ability to recognize whether or not you're lost. There's two questions you're always asking when you're flying via far. Where am I? And that could, that could be number two, am I lost? You don't have to be really that far, of course, to be lost. You know, this document though, keeps you on track. Hey, I made it to this body of water, this highway in this example, it took me 15 and a half minutes. And I can almost see my next point out there, we're in the right place. I've, this is all working. Yeah. When you look out the window and go, wait a second, where's that lake? That's the beginning of you being lost. And this all happens electronically now, at least in the instrument world. When you put in fixes, the foreflight will do an avlog for you, doesn't have all these details, but it's, it's keeping you on a map. It's keeping you on this line real time. This is the old school way. That's what it's doing, is this. Yeah. The most loss I ever got, or I would see people get, was when you flew that first leg, you got to where your first fix was supposed to be. And you didn't see this thing, this landmark, right? But you're like, huh, well, let's just do the next leg and start the timer and turn to the heading. Nope. It's called compounded lossness. Now it's getting worse. You need to find that first landmark, you need to find your first point and restart from there. But that could be a difficult task if you cannot locate yourself on the map. I'm going to pull up his second sheet here. Let's see. Did I pull that up? No. Let me just stop share. This is the back of this navlog, which I thought had a bunch of amazing little tools in it that they built in for their situational awareness. Because when you get into an airplane, half your brain gets left at the FBO, so write as much of this stuff down as you can. Do you like this? I love this. I'm going to take off the banner so we can see all of it here. Okay, I can do that. I got it. Okay, so little notes. Area forecast, talking about some weather. Let's see the area for the departure weather important. Pattern entry tracks that you drew out. Like I started here. This is how I'm going to get out of this pattern. I'm or how I'm going to get into my other intermediate airport here. And another downwind entry at it. Maybe that's coming back to this airport. I don't know these airports by hand or off by heart, but pattern altitude is 31, 29 and 26. Notes, do not forget the tail number. That's a good one. Watch for glider aircraft after this point. So there's something on the map that indicates there might be a little increased risk of encountering a glider that's probably not on a radio. What else jumps out at you on this sheet? I just, I love the detail. I love that the runways aren't even just lines, they're actually little rectangles. This is how I had to think about and plan out my flights in the beginning. What is my orientation to this airport when I'm getting there? What is the runway direction going to be? How will I then reorient myself to the pattern, you know, et cetera and drawing it out visually like this is the way that my brain worked as well. Don't, not forgetting your call sign is funny because last night we were making fun of a pilot who kept messing up his call sign and like, dude, it's your call sign. I know it better than you do and it's not even mine. That happens with flight school. So if you fly multiple airplanes, well, this wasn't, this was a citation. Oh, probably not multiple. But maybe it was a company, you know, they fly multiple planes. I don't know. But they were using an N number. So anyway, maybe just thought it was funny. All right, big picture. Let me see my notes here. You want to help me catch up, make sure we caught everything on here. I thought it was a good, a good thing to point out, show what an actual NavVlog looks like. For those of you who've never done one of these by hand, and it's possible, I don't think that's impossible that you, that you got to this point in your, in your training and never did one. If you sat down and actually spent a couple hours that it takes to do one of these accurately, you probably would be okay if you lost it all, got sucked out the window or your iPad went blank. You've done a lot of work. A lot of that's embedded in your brain. Yeah. And you're really learning about the effects of wind on not only your heading, but your fuel burn, how long it takes you to get places, you're really getting into the nitty gritty of that plane on that flight. And writing down all these little details is really important. You're studying, you're preparing, pre-flighting, all the things that matter for feeling confident when you get into the plane. And if you did get, happen to get lost, you got off course, you've studied that map so much. Hey, I remember this, this wasn't on my, this wasn't on my flight plan. This wasn't on my course line. But I remember this point that could help you get out of a jam really well and in a, in a pinch. If you did find yourself, you know, strained off course, the wind wasn't doing what you thought. I don't know. What are your other thoughts on this? So overseas, and we had all this fancy GWS technology to get us there. We still carried paper, a nav log, that told us all these points that told us wind correction that told us, like that system goes out completely. And we had paper maps, I can transition back to the map and the nav log. And yeah, we're probably not going to be plus or minus 30 seconds. But, but if that does become a problem, I can overcome that with coordination and communication. We have the same thing. We have an avlog that we use on the, over, flying over the ocean. Yeah. Our checkpoints are points in space. They're, they're documented. Everybody knows what we're going to. It's a lat long intersection. Four or five of them usually between land masses, Europe, or America. And if everything went out, and all we had was our compass and a watch. Yeah. We could, we could reasonably stay on course. I've checked up on the wind that they estimate. Yeah. And it's usually within five knots. Yes. They are very accurate. Yeah. Now, it would take a, I'll call it a team effort to make sure we stay on this line that ATC in non-radar world thinks we're on. There's no one to tell, hey, you're drifting off the line. Yeah. All right. They expect you to stay on it. So it doesn't look exactly like this, but it has all the elements as the wind, the speed, we check our fuel. So many times it's ridiculous because if we had a fuel leak, that's important that we know that, we can, we got to be able to do something about that. So we're monitoring that like crazy. But all of this is, this seems basic like, oh, I'll never have to do this again. No, like you said, it carries into the military environment. It definitely carries into the airline environment. And it's the basis of so many things that we take advantage or take for granted in the electronic flight back world. Yeah. So good for you. Thanks for sharing the story. Yeah. Cool. All right, moving on. Feedback time. Feedback. There are two of these. The second one is helicopter as she, so I'll get the first one. Okay. From Supercaster, Julie Gall, pay AGNRH. Thanks for the amazing podcast. I've learned so much listening to you two over the past couple of years. It's been one of the most sensical explanations of some of the nascomplexities I've seen. Before I dive in, I want to apologize for any grammatical errors. I do math and flight planning for a living. You don't do grammar. Fair enough. I wanted to share this story with you all as a cathartic way for me to work through it. Now, hold on a minute. Now, you just get them telling us you're not a grammar, you're not a writing. Okay. And then you put a word of like cathartic in there. I'm not believing it. I'm now holding you accountable for your grammar. We have a trust foundation issue. Yep, it's been shattered. It's a bit wrong. So I understand if you don't include it on the show, but I think it's important for us pilots to acknowledge mental health at all phases, but especially in training. This has been a busy year for me. I started out as your average low time private pilot with an instrument rating since January. This was sent in 25. Okay, recently. So about a year now, I've advanced through my commercial, CFI initial, advanced ground instructor, instrument ground instructor, and now a tow pilot endorsement. And the biggest check right of all getting married. Oh man. That's a big year. All this while working a full time engineering job. While I'm proud of my accomplishments and happy to never have to do those check rides again, I realize now I put too much pressure on myself to not only get all of this done within a year, but to do each exam perfectly. This led to months long stretches where all I did was work, fly and study. I didn't see the signs at the time, but I now realize that that was an unsustainable rate for me. It all started catching up about a month ago when I started when I first started feeling nervous while flying by myself. I pushed the feeling aside and convinced myself that it would go away after a few more flights. Unfortunately, the feeling grew slightly more each flight until my first flight back after Thanksgiving. I was flying solo practice laps in the pattern and an attempt to get my confidence back. However, I neglected to do a proper I am safe checklist. If you don't know what that means, look it up. I am SAFE. All the things that pilots should be thinking about before they jump in an airplane. I was tired, very hungry and had been feeling apprehensive about the flight. Each lap in the pattern built a little confidence, but overall, I was not feeling it and decided to call it quits, though not before doing one final lap to try to end on a good note. My last lap started just fine until I hit an unexpected wind shear, 200 feet above the runway. It went from calm winds at the surface to a 20-knot direct crosswind. In the moment, I was emotionally hijacked by panic and started mentally spiraling. See, you're so like I'm a math guy. This is great writing. It is. Emotionally hijacked by panic and started mentally spiraling. There was nothing I wanted more to be back on the ground after a few 10 seconds that it felt like hours. I managed to snap myself out of it and talk myself through the landing. After I landed, I shut down and went home. The entire way, thinking about how scary that feeling of panic was and began to get angry at myself for letting that happen, especially since it was nothing new to me and it seemed completely unreasonable. Since then, I have done some introspection and began to realize all the factors that led to the situation. I've decided to take a break from flying for now until I'm in a position to get back up safely. When that time comes, I plan to go up with a trusted CFI to build that confidence back. I'm committed to making sure this is just a temporary setback, not a reason to give up. Going through an issue like this is scary on its own, but it's made worse when you feel like you're the only one that has felt this way. I hope my story may be helpful to anyone else that experienced these feelings while flying. If for nothing else than to know you are not alone, please feel free to share my story on an episode. Hopefully I'll have more positive news to share as I navigate my way through this challenge. In the meantime, I'll continue to search for an OB addict's anonymous support group. Upon reviewing my podcast player, I've come to realize that I've streamed your voices directly into my brain for over 8,000 minutes at one X speed this year while on my daily runs. I imagine at some point I'll qualify for restitution due to the penguin-shaped growth on my frontal lobe, all the best, Julek, off. We laughed a little bit during that. Thank you for sharing your story. I'm sure there's somebody listening that is saying, hey, I like hearing this. I'm not alone. I shared a little bit of my background in going through training and I packed a lot into one of my first years in aviation before I became an instructor. It is a lot and you get overwhelmed. It's very stressful, especially if you're in a time crunch and you said, I'm going to do all these things, by the way, including getting married. I wasn't doing that at the same time. It's a lot and it may come crashing down into you all once this happened to coincide with a weather event that shook you up. I don't disagree with your decision to step back from it. Take a deep breath. I love your plan of getting back up in the air. Set a timeframe. No matter what, I'm scheduling a lesson on this date. When you hear this, schedule it, call this FBO, call your old instructor, somebody you know you're comfortable with. Hey, it's been a few months since I've been on the plane. I got a little ahead of myself. I was a little bit shook up. I want to go back up and go do something fun. Go from point A to point B. Don't go up and do maneuvers and anything crazy. Just go do the part that you always look forward to flying and doing something fun. Go do that. Yeah. But you're not alone. This happens to everybody. It happened to me. I was what I think I tried to do that justified it. I would pause between ratings even though it was only a couple days before I started my next one. Hang out with non-aviation friends. Get on the phone with people that have nothing to do with aviation and step out of those things for a little bit. Seems like what you're doing right now, living life, holidays, plenty of excuses not to go fly wintertime. You have to separate yourself from that every once in a while. You cannot be in it 100% all the time. What do you got, Eugene? That's right. Yeah. No, you're definitely not alone. I have been through periods of my flying career just like this. Or yeah, I didn't want to go flying. I just did not. And it happens. And sometimes you don't really know why. For me, some of it was experiences that I had that were unpleasant. I didn't want to repeat those, but some of it was just the fear of being afraid of something that wasn't necessarily going to happen. But I was just scared of having that feeling. I guess it's that whole, you know, is the fear of fear. The fear of fear itself. So yeah, take some time. Take some time. Nothing wrong with that. It's so good that you you recognized it and step back a little bit. Some people would not have done that. They would have just kept pressing on. Yep, and it's snowballs, it gets worse. And then you've, you know, you may end up taking a significant amount more time not flying when it builds up that much. So yeah, seem to have nipped this in the bud early. Yeah, sounds like you had a successful year in the ratings and congratulations on all that and getting married. And just let it simmer for a little bit. But set a date. That's my challenge to you. I'm not waiting till the day I wake up and say I want to go fly just put it on the calendar. This is the day I'm going to go do it. It doesn't have to be anything crazy a couple hours in the airplane. Go go go somewhere you're always meant to go. Hey, we always talked about going here. I want to go. All right. And that may be enough to, hey, I got this. I know what I'm doing. I hit a bump in the literal in the air and in the way I felt. But that's all behind me now I can move forward. Yep. Thank you, Julie Goff. You get number two. Number two from Supercaster Alpha Mike Good Day. And happy holidays as I write this on Christmas night. I'm going to put a picture on the screen while you're talking. On a recent flight in the helicopter building both night PIC and cross-country time I flew to an airport. One that fellow listener of the Badger pilot is very familiar with. Just west of the Brew City, Charlie to do some pattern work after finishing up and departing that airport. I decided to do a downtown tour over the Brew City before heading back to the Mars Cheese Castle Delta. No idea what that means. I'm going to show you the actual castle today. Now you will know. Huh. Yep. For context, downtown Brew City is almost due north of the Brew City airport and just outside the surface area of their Charlie airspace. So I got in contact with them before heading into the area. After a few beautiful laps around the city at roughly five to six hundred AGL, I told Brew City Tower that I would like to go back to the Mars Cheese Castle Delta. Going direct would put me on a 190 heading. Going directly over top of Brew City, Charlie, who are landing and departing 25 left. Okay. Okay, that's this one right here. Yep. So I asked to do that. I figured right over the top of the center of the airport flying almost perpendicular to the active runway was a safe place to be and it would sure be going all the way to the west to get around their surface area. I agree. If you're going to go over the airport or through the airspace, that's the best place. Tower obliged, but I asked me if I could take a climb to 3,500 or roughly 2,900 AGL, which in fixed wing aircraft feels low, but in a helicopter feels like nosebleed territory. Yes. Why am I up here? What is, what are we doing? I was of course happy to accommodate, but a bit surprised and disappointed. I figured maybe they wanted me higher in case someone went missed, even though it was a clear visibility. However, as I got close, they told me to remain north of the runway for landing traffic. So maybe not. Huh. Anyway, I'm looking for your thoughts first on this specific scenario. What would you prefer from a helicopter in this situation? Say you had a spinny thing on top aircraft trying to go from coat factory to cigarette while tried as using the two threes. What would your preferred route and altitude be for them? What things are you considering as part of that decision? Second and more general question. What are one or two things you wish helicopter pilots knew or would do differently when traversing your airspace from one side to the other? Feel free to insert a rant here. Thanks as always for helping to enlighten this crazy pilot who not only wants to fly or learn to fly all the things, but also wants to learn to do so in the most responsible way possible. Okay. I get why they want you to do 3500. Maybe the departures go to three. Maybe a missed approach goes to three. They're wanting to protect for the missed. If you are midfield and you're lower, it could be problematic with a go around. I've always preferred transitioning more over the approach end and a little bit higher, but even then, let's say they go around on a two mile final. Now something has to happen. They've got to turn immediately or you need to start doing something different. So there's always kind of a weird place. So I get the 3500. What I would like to do, what I try to do is point them towards the approach end and then point out the traffic. Do you see the traffic? For you, you're going southbound 11 o'clock, two miles of a CRJ on final for 25 left. Yeah, we have them pass behind that traffic continue southbound. I put it on you. It makes it super easy. Right, which in this case may have been in like an eastbound turn towards the lake for a little bit longer. I'll go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah, but just let you let the helicopter because there's so much more maneuverable than airplanes and you could slow down significantly. You can, I doubt you're going to come to a hover. That's everybody thinks that of helicopters. Oh, they could just come to a hover. Well, that is not what we want to do. So I'm going to turn that question around a little bit and say I wish controllers would work helicopters differently and letting them do a little bit more of the work. They want to they kind of want to treat them like fixed wing more. But I like to let them do more of the stuff and use the helicopter the way it can be used. What things do I wish helicopter pilots knew? That's a tougher one because they'll helicopter pilots will pretty much do whatever you ask them to do. They're really super easy. You just have to be willing to ask or know to ask certain questions like that. The other thing you could do is get out low and go underneath the final a little ways out. You don't have to go like out over the water here in this case. But at 500 AGL, you don't have to be very far out and you're underneath the final. That might not be ideal, especially if it's at night. I got a suggestion just by looking at the map and I don't know how far west you were. If you wanted to go south and you're a couple miles west of the airport, you're directly in the way of departures. So I could see why they wanted to climb you. I've had the benefit of looking at this for a few minutes. Maybe the controller didn't think about this. I like AGL's idea of following the airplane on final, go behind them. Another idea would have been, hey, can you do a low approach on that south runway if it's 1-9? I'm making that up. I don't have the airport map. But do a low pass, a low approach at a couple hundred feet. It keeps you where you are altitude wise. It puts you in a predictable place for the controller. They know what the timing looks like on an airplane crossing that runway over another runway that you're visible easily seen by them. And any separation concerns they had might have been solved by that. I agree with you though. Sometimes people or controllers seem to over control helicopters. They can hover thing is stupid. That's not really true. Not always true. No. They can as they're close to the airport. If it's a landing airport, hey, hold short of this runway. But coming up to a hover at 3,500 feet is not a given. Right. That's what I mean. Yeah, for a small helicopter. Right. I think what I tried to teach this, if I had anybody in a helicopter, what do I do scenario? Treat them just like you would if it was a Cherokee. Yeah, if you're not sure what to do. Yeah, just like a fixed wing airplane. Yeah. It's, it could go that fast. It can move around. You don't have to make it more difficult by thinking the helicopter gives them special powers. Just treat them like an airplane. I don't know. Maybe that was oversimplified, but... Yeah. They, they, controllers make it way more complicated than it needs to be for helicopters. I think it could be much easier. Also, and we don't do it enough. So places that work helicopters all the time, they, that's just what they do. And it happens. But where we don't work them hardly at all, when they want to do something weird that doesn't fit into the flow, controllers are like, uh, I don't know. It does not compute. Right. The last question you had was, what would you do with a helicopter from the east that needs to cross over Triad to an airport that's just northwest when we're departing southwest? So you'd be, you'd be right in the way if you just went straight. What would you tell them to do in the tower? Or what would you say you're combined up? It's the mid, but you do have arrivals. How, how would you ask them to get through your aerospace? I just, I'm going to get them close till they see the conflict and have them go around the conflict. Okay. That's fair. I do not like saying remain north or south of the runway. If they can see the traffic and especially if they're higher, they're, it's not a runway incursion for you to cross the runway. It's an overflight. Agreed. They're not using the runway, you know, if they're hover taxing, okay, yeah, maybe. But up at 1000 AGL, 2000 AGL, this is not a runway crossing. This has come up specifically at my base airport. They fly helicopters not underneath us anymore. I haven't seen that in a while given the previous accident in DC. I think that's stopped. At least I haven't been part of those. They'll fly at 1000 feet AGL perpendicular to the approach end of the runway. Okay, they're 1000 feet above where we should be. But when I'm flying pilot, I brief, if we go missed, this is 100% a factor. Yeah. As soon as we become a projectile going in that direction, that traffic is absolutely a factor. Yeah, because what are you going to do? Just stay at 200 feet and fly straight? Right. No, you're, you're getting away from the earth. And there's multiples of, you know, one pass, it's no factor. Yeah, there's another one that's going to be right on top of us. So just have it in your head. We can't just blast off. Right. Straight and disregard this. We will hit them. So from the controller's perspective, especially if it's even mildly busy, if a missed approach or departures go to 3000 feet, having you at 3500 is like the no thinking, no brain required solution. Yes. It is the I'm guaranteeing separation without having to think about it. Yep. If I forget about you, oh, it doesn't matter. You're not going to get hit. Right. The worst that happens is I don't make a traffic call that I should have made. And maybe there's a T-CAS RA because that happens all the time with 500 feet separation. But compared to the worst case scenario, that that's nothing. So that's where the controller's coming from. A lot of the times we, we don't like to give ourselves something to watch, something that I have to pay attention to. Because it requires brain power that I need to devote elsewhere. What are we looking at? The reference name, the Mars Cheese Castle Delta, the Delta is the city that you can see on or it's on the other map starts with a kilo. This is the actual place, a store that apparently only sells cheese. It's shaped like a castle. A cheese store. Yes, it's a cheese castle. A cheese castle. Only in Wisconsin. I'm pretty sure there's a taxiway at O'Hare that goes right by here. The one that takes you an hour and 10 minutes to get back to the terminal. I cannot wait to see what the chat has done with this. Excellent. Okay. I think we got all of your questions. Thank you, Alpha Mike. And I still think it's awesome that you're doing the helicopter thing. I can't remember where you are in the training and how close you are to ratings in this. Have we gotten to that point yet? Or there's ratings? I don't, I can't remember. Update us. Give us a summary. Times where you're at, what's happening, please. Yes. All right. We'd are best to respond to supporter feedback and let you know when you'll be on an upcoming show. If you're not going to be on a show, we usually get back to the supporter somehow. Be email. Thank you. Keep sending in the questions and we'll keep sending you the answers. HG, anything to add? I do not. Closing out, episode 419 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.