 Thanks, Cheryl. And I can't wait to see the rest of that exciting interview. Welcome everyone. I'm Fred Kaiser, and I'm your host here at the FA Accretion, the FAST team, National Resource Center, FA Production Studios here at the Sun and Fun Complex at Lakeham, Florida. Another exciting presentation. It's going to be incredible about GPS, but our next presenter is a Chief Flight Instructor for the AOPA Safety Foundation. He's a former Boeing 767 captain and check airman for American Airlines. He's been an active CFI for more than 29 years, over 13,500 hours logged. He teaches regularly out of his home base at Frederick, Maryland. He has a 172 that he flies for pleasure and of course for business. And he's a regular on the speaking circuit, places like here, the AOPA expo, 99 groups. And he is a member of the Civil Air Patrol. His topic today is going to be GPS, the ground up. And let's give a warm welcome to JJ Greenway. Thank you very much, Fred. I've been coming to Sun and Fun long enough to know that if you have the one o'clock speaking slot, there's going to be a little bit of competition. You'll hear the competition in a little bit. The building will shake and it'll sound like people are firing at us and you'll hear some very loud jet noises. So if we have to pause once in a while as we get through this, then we'll let some of the noise abate and then continue on. GPS, I'm always looking for good GPS stories and I had probably my best GPS story on my way here. I came down from Frederick, Maryland in AOPA's Bonanza with my boss, Bruce Lansberg. And we had a good trip down. No problems. We landed at the airport and here we are. So that's when the GPS fun began. We got into rental car and it had a GPS in it. Well, I'm pretty good with airplane GPS. I do a lot of that but I don't do a lot of rental car GPS. I live in a small town and there's not a whole lot of need for a rental car GPS or a car GPS at all. So we started off from Tampa, Vandenberg, Tampa Executive Airport and started here and my boss, Bruce Lansberg, he said he didn't need no stinking GPS. So I started playing with it and I entered the hotel where we were staying in the Hilton Garden Hotel and it said not found or doesn't exist. I forgot what it was. I thought that was kind of funny because it had everything in there and Bruce Lansberg said, well, since you're on the H-Page, you said try Hooters. So I entered Hooters in there and see what it says. So I entered Hooters in there and it says nearest Hooters? Yes or no? So I don't know if that was an advertising thing in that little Garmin GPS or what it was but couldn't find the Hilton Garden Hotel but it could find the nearest Hooters and wanted to know if we wanted to go there. So by hook or by crook we found our way here with no GPS at all. Quick word for our airport support network at AOPA. We have any AOPA members in here? Oh, good. Okay. I guess you all stopped by the AOPA booth and saw that nice serious that you're going to win down there. More on that a little bit later. One of the things that your $39 a year gets you as being AOPA members, one of the things that we do is the airport support network is out there looking to protect your rights to land and operate and use any public use airport. What we try to do is we try to have volunteers at each and every public use airport. We try to have people that can be our eyes and ears on the ground and if local town council or at the state level if an airport wants to be closed or in the case of Chicago Mayor Daley wants to take a bulldozer out and destroy the runway in the middle of the night. We try to be a little more proactive on that rather than reactive and we try to have somebody there that can tell us what's going on that knows. So we're looking for volunteers and if any of these airports that are within 150 miles of Lakeland here, many of these airports are near and dear to any of you all here and you want to be one of our volunteers that our eyes and ears on the ground. All by our booth, I believe it was at the AOPA booth number eight and talk to our people in the airport support network and we'll see if we can get you signed up. It doesn't entail a lot other than just letting us know if you hear of a problem at a local airport. A couple of things, if you're interested in obtaining Wings credit, a gentleman will be around with a clipboard and you can sign up with your name and email and we'll make sure that you get Wings credit for this course and if you're in the Accident Forgiveness program with your insurance company if they participate and most of the big ones do, there's safety seminar registration cards in the back. If you just fill those out and we will take those at the end and AOPA will send you either email or snail mail, we will send you a certificate of completion that you've attended this course and your insurance company will recognize that for various purposes that they use for discounts and for accident forgiveness. A couple of things in the course as we're looking at some of the, talking about the GPS, VFR content and IFR content. Instrument rated pilots in the room today, can I show hands? Good, about 50%. That's usually about what we run. I don't have an instrument rating by the way, I had it taken away. Did you know that when you get your ATP license, they take away your instrument rating? I didn't realize that. I thought it was a mistake when I got my ATP license 20 years ago or so but they take away your instrument rating, I guess they just assume that the airline transport pilot knows how to fly instruments so it doesn't say instrument rated on my license. So there are IFR content and VFR content in some of these slides. Don't get discouraged if some of the stuff, if you're a VFR only pilot, some of the stuff is just a little bit on the high side. We're going to touch briefly on it because it's kind of a quick moving course but I'd like VFR pilots to try to take away one thing from this course. I'd like IFR pilots to try to take away two things. And there's enough little nuggets in here of things that you already knew but you just forgot that I'd like you to take away as we go through. I am not a Garmin salesman. I'm not a Bendix King or a Honeywell salesman. I'm going to talk about some features of some particular units but I'm really not dealing with specific units. I'm not dealing with if we should twist the internob or the outer knob or exactly what the display should look like but I'm trying to keep in general terms just some of the useful tips and some of the things that we need to keep the big picture on as we're using the GPS. As it relates to the operations with ATC and as we look at the integration of GPS into our cockpits. What do we mean by integration? We'll talk about that a little bit more later as far as what we see but we have so many things integrated even into the most simple handheld and I realize that it's hard to call something that costs $5,000 or $7,000 simple but some of these handhelds have some amazing capability that sprung up over in just the last couple of years. I was talking to the folks at the Garmin display about the nice 696 and they advertise it as being small enough to fit on your knee board. You got to have a pretty big knee if you're going to put that on your knee board but a lot of capability in that new unit. Not just navigation but as we'll see we have plenty of other features on that Garmin unit as well. Some of the VFR panel mount units and these are some of the early generation VFR panel mount units that you may be familiar with. No moving map displayed but just numbers. Take a look on that lower unit course I'll talk in a couple minutes about latitude and longitude but you remember when we used to have to deal with latitude and longitude rather than three letter identifiers and four letter identifiers. Moving up in complexity and actually moving up in dollar signs too. I got to think we probably should have put rows of dollar signs as we move up the ladder here. Some of the top of the line stuff the Avidine and of course the G1000 that we're seeing in a lot of the airplanes today. Obviously very capable VFR machines but extremely capable IFR machines some of the things that we have out here. Getting back to the integration look at all the things we have. We have one screen and the whole point of GPS is for navigation but look what we're piling onto that one navigation screen. Weather data link we have uplink XM weather capability on a lot of the units that we have. So on the same screen that we have the route overlay we have the ability to display weather. The back in the mid 90s American Airlines had a tragic accident down in Columbia and on the approach into Calais, Columbia in the Christmas season a Boeing 757 the pilots lost their situational awareness even though they had very capable information in front of them and hit terrain that was at the 9400 foot level. Pretty much broad side of the top of a mountain. Well how could two pilots very well trained pilots with a bunch of information in front of them using navigation data that was even more accurate than GPS in some cases run into a mountain on a clear moonless night. It was after that that the FAA took a real hard look at what we were doing with our navigation equipment and some brilliant engineers came up with the idea of putting the terrain database for the world into navigation units and now even some of the simplest I didn't say the cheapest I said some of the simplest handheld units have terrain databases that are accurate to within a couple of feet. Now I say that they're accurate to within a couple of feet we'll talk later about some accidents that have occurred but this is not terrain following radar that the United States military is using to keep us safe. This is just terrain data to keep us from running into mountains that we might not otherwise see. This is not something so accurate we can launch missiles with it but it's pretty good for keeping us safe and for keeping us from running into the terrain. Fuel management, another thing that's displayed on our screens that we're normally used to navigating on and as we pile on the layers of integrated data take a look this is just one display on the Garmin G1000 that dotted line ring would be the extent of our range with fuel reserves and the utmost range on that solid line of how far we're gonna go until it gets really quiet in the engine stop or the engine stops. Fortunately on this one it looks like we're gonna be able to make it from Labrador all the way across the cold part of the Atlantic to Greenland and it looks like there's a couple of airports within range in that. Checklist, checklist management, different units of course different functions but the user modifiable checklist on some of the Garmin's a real nice feature if you wanna modify your checklist. The Avidyne course has a factory checklist and rather than being completely heads down with a checklist in your lap not a good idea to do a checklist as you're moving in most cases but at least with a checklist up on the panel in front of you you stand a chance of having at least your head up and your eyes out the window more with checklist data available out in front of you. Once again piling on the dollar signs of all the things that we can add to our screens, traffic displays integrated into the GPS screen as well. You see the yellow in the middle of the screen is threat traffic, if it's more threat traffic most likely it's going to turn red. Most of the units are using similar nomenclature. Multifunction displays where we have engine instrumentation up on the same screen as we have navigation information and as we have the fuel information as well. And then of course the synthetic vision kind of top of the line for general aviation now. Been around in military and some airline applications for a good 15 years now. But some of this is getting down into the realm of affordability for even some of the GA airplanes that we're flying including as retrofit not just brand new purchase. The highway in the sky if you look and point in the cursor at the rectangular boxes magenta rectangular boxes that would be indicative of the path of the airplane, the desired path of the airplane and much like the video games that people that are 40 years younger than me are better operating at than me the airplane is simply flown up into those rectangular boxes and that's the path that the airplane is supposed to be on. Very accurate way to steer an airplane for an approach not just for EnRuby but for an approach and landing in some cases all the way down to zero visibility it's been tested. We of course don't have that option in GA yet. If you look right in the middle right there where the cursor is that box is actually traffic from the traffic display. So the traffic shows up as a blip on the screen. So it's a true heads down display as opposed to a heads up display. Good if you're IMC or if you're in the clouds not so good if you're flying around on a VFR day heads down. We're gonna have the volume from the control room. Let's take a quick look at some of the things going on in ATC. We're working in the radar room and this little airplane's flying around the city which is only five miles east of the airport. You can actually be close enough outside the Class Bravo but he potentially became into the Class Bravo and was just flying around the city. Now he's already violated the Class Bravo airspace but he's just flying, we don't know what he's doing. He proceeds to fly to the approach end of the runway and proceeds to cross the first parallel then cross the second parallel then proceed on a downwind. Now what you don't understand is that we're busy. So now every airplane that was on final is no longer on final. Everything's breaking loose. We don't know what this guy's doing. He proceeds to go to the city and he tools around a little bit more and he comes back toward the airport. He flies up and down the runway. He called Flight Service and he says I'm trying to get this to this particular airport. I'm slightly lost. And he says well show me the ground and tell me what you see out there and I can help you. The Flight Service guy recognized where he was and he said to follow the particular interstate and then turn left. This gentleman had his 11 year old son with him in there and they had a GPS on board. He didn't recognize anything and it wasn't where he needed to be. He saw the airport and didn't know what he was supposed to be doing so he calls Flight Service back and he says listen, I'm still lost. I don't know where I am. I'm over this small little city and this small airport and I just don't know where I am. So the Flight Service guy says to him well what do you see? He says well I'm flying around the city. I see a football stadium and the Flight Service guy says well what does it say? He says well it says Ericsson. He goes Ericsson, you're in Charlotte, North Carolina. That's a big airport. He goes well I didn't see any airplanes. And the reason he didn't see any airplanes is because we pulled them all off the final because he was flying all around our airport. So there wasn't anybody moving but him. We finally, the Flight Service guy gave him the frequency, told him to call Charlotte and we made him land and we talked to him big time. His son was working the GPS and didn't quite know how to work it. That's how come they got lost. And Marie has a tendency to understate. Looking into the case a little bit more, he had a little more punishment than being talked to big time. I think he was relieved of his pilot's license for a couple of months or so after that. Kind of funny, but his 11 year old kid was running the GPS but pretty egregious flying over a pretty busy airport that's in the top 15 busiest airports in the nation with a piece of navigation on equipment aboard that was capable of navigating him to an area as big as, as small as his airplane. Yet he is so lost he doesn't know, even know what state he's in. There was just a navigation incursion, I believe it was the day before yesterday. I've been in Washington DC where we live and of course when we have a navigation incursion up in Washington DC over the White House it always makes world news that there was yet another one just a couple of days ago and there was GPS on board but how someone got so far off just a couple of days ago with this equipment on board with all the warnings that have been out there from other people have done it is beyond me, but it's still happening. And that's what I wanna talk about in this course. Like I say, I don't wanna drill down into the nuts and bolts. I wanna try to keep the big picture because there's some really good stuff out here for sale on the grounds and we're getting some better and better stuff in our airplanes, but we're still making some pretty egregious mistakes. Number one and number two, the safety record in general aviation for all the improvement we've had and the devices we've had that are designed to improve safety, our safety record has remained pretty constant and that's one thing that worries me a little bit is that we're spending a lot of money on equipment that's not necessarily making it safer. I know the equipment has the capability of making it safer. I just think that I need to learn a little bit more about how to use it to make it safer. Let's jump into handhelds and I know that a lot of us do use handhelds and I'm still using an old Garmin 195 from a couple of presidential administrations ago. Is anyone using the 195, kind of shaped like a brick? If that was heavy as a brick, good, I'm not the only one. You all still getting updates for that from Garmin? Yeah, so so. I haven't updated mine for a while, we'll talk about that, but it's tough to get updates on some of the older ones. These are some of the newer VFR handhelds and some of the capability of it. The 396, 496 course is a popular one and it's got a lot of information available on it. Of course, you pay more if you're gonna get traffic input to it with a subscription. The 696, like I mentioned earlier, very capable unit and the old Bendix King, which Honeywell is making now is still on the market. It's available even with synthetic vision with an additional plug-in. Some of the early panel mounts up at the top there, as you see, GPS units, basically not integrated glass cockpits, but yet boxes that we slide into the avionics stack. Some of the capability of those, they're WOS-equipped unlike the hand-held GPS. We have panel mounts that are WOS-equipped, we'll talk more about that later. All of them are capable of getting traffic and the WOS-equipped ones are, of course, approved for sole source of navigation. Moving into the integrated panel of the glass panel with the GPS, the G1000, of course, the Garmin 600 and some of the more sophisticated integrated panels, is it the same thing as sliding boxes in? Not really the same thing. You'll notice on the G1000 or the avidine units, if you're not getting a GPS signal, you essentially have blank screens other than engine information. So you need to have that GPS input on an integrated cockpit if you have all glass screens in the cockpit. Capability of those, of course, is they're all very capable units all the way down to the serious perspective on the G1000 that even has a blue button in the middle that if you get in trouble, you can press it and it levels the wings and is designed to get you out of a bad situation if you get yourself into one. So I'll show you a picture of that a little bit later. Some of the early generation GPS, and I know that I'm not the only one here that's been flying for more than 15 years, but we've been using GPS for about that long for VFR and IFR operations. But just to show how far we've come, anyone fly out of this area, this airport? Could someone tell me the northerly latitude of this general area? Anybody? Northerly latitude. We're not the equator, we're not 45 degrees north. Anybody want to venture a guess? 27, 28, 30, okay. Reason why you know that is back in the old days, we used to have to deal with latitude and longitude and all those things, for those of us been entering latitude and longitude into some of these machines for a while, we have these little bits of information stuck in our head about latitude and longitude, so we tend to know the latitude of the cities we fly to, or longitude, or at least generally, I still remember San Juan, Puerto Rico, is 182.656.6002, and Seattle Boeing Field is 47.32.122.18, so I don't need to know those anymore, and one time maybe I did, but now on these newer units, we are simply entering waypoint names, so Kilo, Lima, Alpha Lima for Lakeland, Florida, and Kilo, Mike, India Alpha for Miami, Florida, so we really only need to know the three letter identifiers, not the entire string of digits for latitude and longitude. Great thing for decreasing the workload in the cockpit, decreasing the amount of time that we're spending entering things into the machine. 435, 30, of course, the Garmin, fairly typical of what a lot of most people are flying with right now. Small screens, maybe, but pretty good display of data. Move up to the G1000, of course, and nice big screens. I had the opportunity to go through, I asked for a show of hands on who's gonna win that new, or who's an AOPA member, so y'all have the opportunity to win that new Cirrus. So earlier in February, I went and got Cirrus factory training so I could deliver it to you and give you your 10 hours of training for the insurance company. So for an old guy like me that's been flying for awhile, I really appreciated that horizon that's almost a foot across that you can see. Really hard to miss that all the way a foot across in front of you there. I really appreciated that display in the new Cirrus. So, great display of data. Tough to miss if you got all brown on that screen and your nose is way down, or if you have all blue on that screen and your nose is way up, you'd have to be really vision impaired to not see that. Cirrus perspective, of course, and I mentioned the easy button there in the middle of the panel. And some good stuff out there. Of course, standby instruments. First thing I like to do is when I get in the cockpit is look for something familiar. And of course, when I got in that cockpit, these three were the only real familiar ones. I knew what those were, but in a matter of a week, the training came, it wasn't easy, but the training came to me pretty well. The synthetic vision, like I mentioned earlier, is even available on some of the smaller handheld units. Basically, all it's done is it's taken the world terrain database, plugged it into the positional base, and sort of flushed out a picture of what the terrain's like below you. It's not like infrared radar that's actually looking at it, but it's just a pretty good representation of the terrain that's down there. Quick view on the Cirrus perspective watch is just a view of the cockpit and then it's a view of the cockpit in flight. Kind of neat to see some of the things that are available. Like I said, this is informally referred to as not a heads-up display, but a heads-down display. Nice programming capability. And take a look as, and this is looking not out the window, but this is looking at the navigation screen with a synthetic vision. Of course, the sea level, or the blue, is the water. And we move on to land and higher terrain elevation in a lighter color until we get darker color. And then we have terrain that's a threat. And you can see we're getting a pull-up indication right here visually for terrain that's a threat. Turns red, and when the threat is mitigated or the airplane's turned away, it's not quite so prominent. Terrain turns to yellow. As we're back in danger zone, we get red terrain. So this takes some pretty benign flying and makes it all the easier to see where the threat is. Now we're headed right down the final approach on about a three-degree glide slope toward the runway. You can see the runway coming up on us right there. We're flying the synthetic vision, the highway in the sky, right down the slot. And as we approach the runway, we can see the centerline of the runway. This is all generated synthetically. Wow, I hardly ever touched down on the centerline like that. So good display. Pop quiz as we go along here just to make sure everyone's on their toes. When do you need current GPS data? Anybody wanna answer that one? When you get an FAA ramp inspection? No, that's probably not a bad idea to have it, but when do you need it? There are times, well, you should always have it. Coming from the Air Safety Foundation, I wouldn't recommend that you run around without current GPS data, but you actually can fly and you can fly IFR in some certain cases without having an up-to-date database. Enroute IFR, there's a provision made that if you check the position or check the coordinates and make sure the intersections have not been moved, completely legal. Approach IFR, we start getting into some areas where you do need to have a current database. So something to look in the aeronautical information manual about the circumstances under which you do need current data for the GPS and you're allowed to operate without it. It's a lot of the Air Safety Foundation programs that we put on, we look for accidents that have happened, we try to find disturbing trends and we try to make a safety seminar that'll correct those. Not a lot of accidents that have happened from people misusing GPS. A lot of people getting lost, a lot of people getting violated in the case of the people that flew over the White House the other day, but we looked in the Aviation Safety Reporting System, ASRS, that NASA runs for the FAA, and we looked at not accidents that happened, but incidents that happened that could have become accidents and we dug into them and got some of the information because these are things that could, maybe you're not gonna fly over the White House like these guys did, but some of these mistakes, tell me if you could have made them. The user in this one used the direct to the waypoint, the database was one cycle out of date, that's 28 days, less than 28 days out of date. The waypoint name didn't change, but the location did. So he sure enough navigated to the point, but the point wasn't where he thought the point was, and nothing happened. He reported himself, he didn't get in trouble, he received vectors to a new location and landed without incident, but his comment was a current database would have avoided that happening. Let's jump in the airplane, or at least go out on the flight line and just look at some of the practical gotchas when we're using the GPS, some of the problem areas that we've uncovered in the Air Safety Foundation where people are having problems and interspersed along the way, we'll look at some of the safety reports that have come in of people that have confessed the problems they've had, and hopefully these can be learning moments for all of us. In the pre-flight, not that the pre-flight briefing isn't long enough as it is, but there's a couple more things you're gonna wanna check, the GPS and WASNOTEMs. You dig through there and there's some really interesting things. I saw one the other day, it said GPS unreliable within a one nautical mile of, and it gave a point, up to 7,000 feet. So right in that area, it's kinda like that black cloud that follows Dennis the menace around. Right in that area, there's no GPS signals. I don't know what's happening to them. I sometimes like to speculate, but sometimes the government likes to block GPS areas in certain, GPS signals in certain areas, just to do a test to see if that capability exists. It happens on a wider scale area, of course up in the DC area, we see that once in a while, but that's always put out by Nautem. Department of Defense rarely just shuts down GPS signals that I know of, just for fun. So they usually put out a Nautem in advance and you know if you're gonna have unreliable signals. Minimum altitudes, another thing to check. The whole point of a GPS is to get us out there going direct. That's why we spend all the money on a GPS. We don't need to fly point to point. We don't need to follow roads. We don't need to fly VOR to VOR, but we're gonna go direct. But the one thing the following roads following the VORs gives us is terrain clearance that is pretty benign and terrain clearance that we know about. Going direct, you're gonna wanna check obstructions and terrain, make sure you have enough clearance. Airspace is another good one too. Not just the real prominent airspace that everybody knows about TFRs or presidential TFRs during the election, there's lots of those. But one of the gotchas is the sports TFRs, stadium TFRs. Those things tend to come up and go away with not a lot of fanfare. If a game goes over time, sometimes even the controllers don't know if the TFR is still active and they have to ask. But do recall that one of the things that the Department of Homeland Security has given us is TFRs or temporary flight restrictions over large gatherings of people assembled for sports complexes. Of course we have Disneyland under the same thing too. So FAA is the best source for this. The internet flight planner, and AOPA's internet flight planner is really good. FlightAware.com has some good information on these last minute TFRs that pop up. Entering the route and the waypoints. Unless you have one of the more sophisticated units where you can enter an airway, the number of the airway, the jet airway, or the victor airway, think about what you're loading into the GPS. On a typical installation on a 430 Garmin or a 530 Garmin, you're entering the VOR and then you have an airway and it leads to another VOR. If you simply enter one VOR and the other VOR, you've just connected those two VORs. Is that a straight line between them? Chances are it's not a completely straight line. I know that's the easy thing to do is just enter those two anchoring points on that airway, but you need to enter a few intersections if you're actually going to accurately fly that. Particularly important for IFR. The controller has you in radar contact most likely, and those few intersections in between, there might be just a couple of degrees of variation, magnetic variation or declination between those VORs. So you may not get as accurate a routing if you're just anchoring the route VOR to VOR. Double check that. The IKO identifier or the four letter identifier versus the three letter identifier. The FAA is trying to get away from this and it's been most successful in the last decade or so, but we still have a disturbing number of airports around the country that have the same name as the VOR. Portland, Oregon, VOR used to sit up on a hill and it was PDX. The Portland Airport was down on the river and it was also PDX or KPDX. And there have been dozens of people that have flown to the VOR and before they renamed it, have flown to the VOR and realized that they were nowhere near the airport. We have that even in Florida. There's about a half dozen VORs and airports that are not co-located, but do have the same identifier with the exception of the K in front. Something to double check if you're not familiar with a particular area. One ASRS report that came in was the pilot admitted that he had not entered the K in front of the three-letter identifier, didn't realize his mistake and actually busted Cincinnati's Class B airspace on this. Filing the report and confessing his predicament actually saved him from getting a violation on this, but that's the reason why the FAA has this program is so pilots can tell on themselves and hopefully the rest of us can learn from the mistakes that some other people have made with this. As far as filing direct is concerned, did you really check these things prior to getting into the airplane? Minimum altitudes, terrain and airspace. Before you press that direct button, that's something to take a look at. Walk around the ramp at most airports and take a look in the cockpit at most GPSs and there's paint has kind of worn off one button on most units and it's usually that direct button. Pilots are using that a lot. It's the easiest thing to use in there, but the ability to load a flight plan is a capability of virtually all of these GPSs. Not a bad idea to make sure that you know how to load one. For IFR flying the departure procedures, the RNAV departure procedures and the RNAV standard terminal arrivals, the STARS, these must be in the database and it must be a current database. These are not things that can be manually entered and that's in the FAA order and we can't use it if it's not in the database. This doesn't affect most of us, but last June, if we are filing a flight plan using RNAV arrivals and RNAV departures, the IK or the International Flight Plan is required. For those of us that are not using RNAV arrivals and departures, we're still using the same old flight plan that's near and dear to all of us that we've been using for coming upon four decades. The airlines have all switched to the International Flight Plan because the airlines are virtually all of them are using the IFR arrivals and IFR departures. One thing that is confusing, and I guarantee I can unconfuse it for you real quick as far as the GPS is concerned, is the RAIM or the Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring. The signals from the satellite are not always good and the geometry that the satellites are in is not always favorable particularly in northerly latitudes. The satellite geometry or where you're hitting them or your receiver is hitting them is not always good if they're low on the horizon or if there's very few satellites. Your GPS, your non-WAS-equipped GPS can predict when you get to your destination if you're gonna have good signal geometry or if the satellites are gonna be able to provide good enough data for you to navigate with. So you can predict your RAIM, either your unit can predict it for you or you can go, there's a RAIM prediction website, rainprediction.net, a government website where you can say when you're going to be at a certain place and it will tell you if you're gonna have a good navigation signal. Now, WAS-equipped GPS, who has a WAS-equipped GPS? Couple people in here, good. I do not have a WAS-equipped GPS. I occasionally fly our Airplanned AOPA that has one. The WAS-equipped GPS, the reason why you spend all that extra money is it kinda does that for you. The WAS-equipped GPS is smart enough that it knows if it's not getting good geometry, if it knows if it's not going to be getting good geometry, knows that it's not gonna be getting good signal capability and it just says, no thanks, I'm not gonna do it and it tells you that or it selects different signals. So think of the RAIM for a non-WAS as a manual thing. Think of all that extra money you spent for your WAS-equipped unit and that is an automatic thing and it does it for you. I am aware that some of the Garmin units before they went WAS-converted still have the capability of the page in there to compute RAIM even though they're WAS-equipped but it's not something that we're using with WAS-equipped airplanes. What happens when you lose everything? You're playing B. If you're VFR, obviously you're playing B is made out of plexiglass and it's right in front of you, it's your window and you can look out your window and use it. Playing B, if you're IFR, do you still have the capability to get VFR? Do you have your charts or to get VOR reception? Do you have your charts with you or do you know the VOR frequencies that you can tune to? Something to think of because GPS is not like any other source of navigation is not 100% reliable although we like to think it is in all parts of the world. Taxing, we did the pre-flight. Time to get the engine running and start taxing. Good idea to get as much as you need to do done before you start the engine. Get the clearance done, particularly if you're single pilot and you can't hang some of the duties on other people in the cockpit. Get the clearance before you start the engine and try to load up as much as you can with the GPS before you start the engine too. That's how the airlines do it. That's why things look pretty busy up in the cockpit before you leave the gate. The pilots are up there. They're not loading GPS or getting clearance on the taxi out. That's all happening at the gate where it's quiet and the airplane's not moving and there's no distractions. All that happens before the airplane moves and then the airplane pushes back in taxis. FAA is real big on this right now and rightly so but runway incursions. There's an FAA Office of Runway Safety headquarters in Washington DC that's very heavily staffed and it's a good thing because not only are airliners running into each other or running onto runways when they don't mean to but in general aviation we kind of have a dismal record of doing that too. Up in Pennsylvania last year there was a lawn mowing crew that ran a lawn mower right out onto the runway in front of an airplane as well. So the FAA is really big on this runway incursion thing and all the distractions in the cockpit now that we have with the items that are available worries me a little bit that we have more things to more reason to be heads down when we really need to be heads up. Nice feature on a lot of the units particularly the panel mounts is the minute you touch down the screen automatically displays an airport taxi diagram. Very nice particularly an unfamiliar airport to be able to look at the taxi diagram and it might as well have one of those things that has on the map out here in front of the building that says you are here because there is your airplane on that taxiway. Real temptation to look down and spend a lot of time looking down at that but once again you have traffic out there that is your immediate priority. Real good way to not get lost though and we highly recommend that you have that page up at least when you're taxiing if you have that capability in addition to having a paper chart out that has a good taxiway diagram on it. One report that came in was at a non-towered field the assessment just landed and the pilot actually spotted a bonanza taxiing on to the runway and someone got on the Unicom that happened to be watching and yelled stop and the bonanza did stop but in the ensuing investigation he admitted that he was programming his GPS and thought he was stopped and his feet had slipped off the brakes a little bit fortunately he didn't hit anything but it came real close and the GPS was admittedly a distraction in this. Let's jump into the departure phase of flight and I know that that moving map that you paid so much for that occupies so much real estate on your panel is real easy for your eyes to be drawn to it and it's got that magenta line but do recall part of what you paid for with your installation is the CDI or the course deviation indicator needle. Pictured here is the older style rectilinear movement non-digital of course the digital display of a needle is a legal representation as well but in virtually all installations for IFR GPS navigation is not legal without that installed CDI or the course deviation indicator. So it's in the airplane it's usually not as easy to look at or as prominently displayed as that nice moving map is but bear in mind the moving map is virtually most all the time for reference the actual course guidance information comes from the moving or from the course deviation indicator needle. On departure I know it seems like the controllers just do this for a test sometimes but how many times you get in your route all loaded up everything's fine and on departure they say fly heading two four zero cleared direct walla walla enable. So you don't even have walla walla in there and you don't even know that the three letter identifier for walla walla is ALW and you are thinking that you're really not impressing that controller at all. Ask for ATC for vectors. ATC didn't do this for a test they didn't do it to make you look foolish in front of your instrument flight instructor or in front of your husband or in front of your wife. Ask ATC for a vector. Say hey I don't have that loaded in yet how about a vector until I get it loaded in. ATC's happy to provide it in I would say 99 out of 100% of the time and maybe 100% of the time. ATC's not there to give you tests they're not there to confuse you but just ask for a vector if they clear you direct somewhere that's not in your flight plan. Real easy to do and the safest thing to do. Pop quiz again. Is GPS approved for a sole source of navigation? Anybody using it for a sole source of navigation? Well VFR it is right? How about IFR? WASP did I hear somebody say WASP? Yeah IFR installations that are WASP approved are used for a sole source of navigation. Otherwise if it's non-WASP then we have VOR backups. If you start reading that FAA order really carefully doesn't say that the VOR has to be operational but it does say that you have to have a backup so just playing by the rules here. Jumping into the enroute phase of flight. Make sure you know how to edit waypoints that's not always intuitive on these GPS units and if you have learned to do it it may take you a while doing it on the ground but in flight when you're moving in a couple miles a minute not a bad idea to make sure that you know how to edit a route because particularly in the east coast here I've rarely flown IFR in the last couple of years that I haven't had an amendment to my route or edit to my route required and I'll be the first to tell you that on some of the GPS units I fly I am very rusty if I ever even knew at all how to edit some of these routes so it's not something that we do a lot of in training but it's something we do a lot of in real life. Not a bad idea if you have a choice autopilot for single pilot IFR. Really good idea. Of course the autopilot is not human. It'll only do what you tell it and if you tell it to do the wrong thing it will quite happily do the wrong thing and not even know it's doing the wrong thing so with another pilot in the cockpit just so I can share the blame a little bit if something goes wrong I kind of like to say when I'm programming the GPS I like to take the autopilot off the GPS steering mode maybe put it in the heading mode and then make the change to the routing and then say to the other pilot how does that look to you? That way if it's wrong you can say hey you told me to do it but at least you're getting two people and at least you're getting a verification of what you have entered into the GPS is it right before your autopilot blindly starts following what you put into the GPS? Just a double check. Other couple things that are popping up that we haven't seen until GPS started getting a little more prolific is the T-Routes. It was actually started in the United States down in Southern Florida and you've probably got more down here than we do up in the Mid-Atlantic Seaboard. Nothing real special but it is an RNAV IFR so it's a WASC capable IFR terminal transition route. No big deals, it's just like an airway it's marked on the map though with a T in a blue box. Terminal routes. In route we have a couple of different types of waypoints. We don't see these so much in route I was looking on a chart out west and it took me about three or four states where I could find them on an in-route chart. We do have the fly over versus fly by RNAV waypoints on approach charts. Quite frequently we have actually most of the time we have both of them on approach charts. When we get to the approach section here in just a couple of minutes we will look at the difference between those. Everybody pay their taxes on April 15th? Good, I don't want to be having anyone have their airplane repossessed. We complain about paying taxes. I gotta tell you the government gives us some good things back once in a while. Let me tell you one thing they're giving us back little by little. They're giving us back more airspace. More airspace you say. The government's taking away airspace. How are they giving us more airspace? Look at this, if you have a GPS that you can navigate with legally IFR think about the MEAs. Now I know we're in Florida and your MEAs your minimum in-route altitudes are about 1,500 feet or 2,000 feet. They're not very much around here. Back where I come from out in the mountain west not uncommon to have MEAs of 12, 14 and 16,000 feet and I don't know about what you all are flying but my CESTA 172 that was made when I was in fifth grade has never been above 14,000 feet and probably wouldn't get above 14,000 feet. So me flying out west when I have my next speaking engagement out in Alaska is probably not gonna work in my CESTA 172. However, the government's doing something good. They are saying that these MEAs what's an MEA predicated on? You have a VOR here and a VOR here and we have a real high MEA. Why do we have a high MEA? Instrument pilots? Reception of the VOR obstructions. I'll take those two. There's a couple other ones but that's fine. We have reception and obstruction. Well, reception is not a factor because I paid $7,500 and I have this nice GPS installed in there so I don't need VOR reception. I could be on the ground underneath that MEA and get really, really, really good reception. So what they're doing is they're lowering the MEAs for those of you or those of us that are using GPS. That's a good thing. So they're giving us back some airspace. This sounds kind of nerdy but I get kind of excited about this because I do a lot of flying out west. So every 56 days when the enroute charts are revised I like to look on there and I'll tell you about a dozen airways per revision cycle are getting revised. So we're getting something good back for that tax money you paid on April 15th. So it's good. Hopefully in the mountain west we'll get a lot of these things down so that even those of us that fly airplanes that don't go very high are gonna be able to get across the Rocky Mountains in good shape. Nearest button. Most of the units have this. Really good, not just nearest airports. That's what we usually use it for but we can get nav aids, ATC frequencies. I used this the other day when I was getting training in that Cirrus that I'm gonna deliver to you when you win it and I wasn't really lost. I was just temporarily unsure of my position and I wanted to ask the flight service station to get the weather for where I was going. So I punched nearest flight service station and it came up with a frequency and I only tell this story to illustrate that not everything that comes out of that box is completely right. The frequency for the nearest flight service station it said 122.1. Does that set off a alarm bell in anybody's head? Anything wrong with 122.1? Anyone wanna talk about it? I got it wrong. Receive only. It didn't tell me though what I was supposed to listen on. So there's some good information but it wasn't complete information that came out of that GPS box. So somewhere dimly in the 30 plus years it's been since I was in private pilot school I remembered that 122.1 probably wasn't gonna work so just use 121.5 instead. No, didn't do that. Okay, but no matter what we're doing VFR or IFR we still have especially IFR too when we think that we have positive protection with ATC we still need to be looking outside. Do you have to carry paper charts if you have charts on your GPS? Unless you have a very expensive paperless cockpit and it's usually not in most of the airplanes we fly that have a single source of electricity so if the screens go blank you have no information but there are paperless cockpits there are installations approved. Most of them are in the larger airplanes that cost in the seven figures not in the six figures but it is working its way down to general aviation there are a few fairly common GA types that have installations like this. It's good stuff but unless you have it you still need to carry paper charts. Jumping into the arrival, the types of approaches. Just in the last year is another good thing your government's given you. Seem to be all about good government. I don't know, woke up in a good mood this morning. I've been out of Washington DC for a while maybe that's it. We now just in the last year have the LPV or the localizer performance with vertical navigation vertical capability. We have LPV minimums on GPS approaches that equal ILS category one minimums. Just flew my first one about a month ago up in State College, Pennsylvania. We recently got one right around the corner from where I live in Hagerstown, Maryland. 200 foot decision altitude and half mile visibility and that's with no ground reference no ground stations at all. That's not an ILS, that's not a localizer that's not a glide slope, that's GPS only. Of course you still need to have lights on the ground runway markings and things like that but the capability is rapidly improving on this. There's getting to be more and more of the LPV approaches. It's opening up a lot of airports for IFR traffic that never had IFR traffic. The localizer performance just like a localizer only and of course the LNAV and VNAV that we've always had. Just to look at the differences in the capabilities of some of these different approaches for IFR pilots, decision altitudes on the LPV of course like I said now all the way down to 200 feet. LNAV, VNAV this isn't 100% correct, it says WASC required. A lot of the airline installations and business jet installations have altimeters that are sensitive enough so they do not need WASC capability for that. Another thing just to be aware of on your specific unit is when to load or activate. The reason why I've thrown this in here is because it does vary from unit to unit. On some of the garments you can activate approach an approach not having loaded it and it will be just fine. Others you have to first load the approach and then activate the approach and also another thing too that I find myself making a big mistake on is what source of navigation are you using? Using VOR or using GPS. It's real easy to switch on and off but I'm a little disturbed by the fact that a lot of airplanes, the installation doesn't have a real clear enunciation in front of you a button that says you are using VOR or you are using GPS. Mode awareness, be sure you know exactly what mode you're operating in. Sounds funny but we're not allowed to create our own approaches. Why would you want to make your own approach if you say we have a lot of private airports around and I know people are doing this but the FAA kind of frowns on people making up their own approaches to their own airports. The FAA is really good about making up an approach to your airport. Like everything else in the government takes a long time but I'm working right now on getting a new approach to our airport up in Frederick, Maryland there and it's been about a year and a half and we actually have a date in October where they said we're gonna have a new approach. So it will take about two years but we will have a legal approach and it's not gonna cost us any money. I guess it costs me those taxes I paid but we're not gonna have to pay for it up front. So if you need an approach to an airport or private airport or even the airport you fly out of they do take requests. Gotta have a good reason for it though. Auto sequencing versus hold and this is another one too that varies, this is one of the functions that varies a lot from unit to unit. If you're going to hold you need to press the hold button when you get there or if you don't press that hold button what's gonna happen is the airplane gonna not know that you're holding and it's gonna go ahead and sequence forward to the next fix. Usually if you don't press that hold button prior to getting there usually you do have to revert to a manual mode because the airplane had no idea that you just received a holding clearance. You notice these pop quiz questions? The answers to most of them have been it depends on one thing or another on this one. This one the answer is not it depends. Can you use a handheld GPS in IFR conditions on this flight plan? I got some nos, I got any yeses? Yes, okay, I got some nos and yeses. Hear me out on this one. Tell me if I'm too far out of bounds. I hope I'm not but I'm not using it for sole source and navigation. I'm not using it to get somewhere with but let's say I don't have an IFR GPS on board and I have a handheld GPS. There is nothing stopping me from taking off out of here like I'm going to do tomorrow morning with a handheld GPS on board and my first fix is going to be Florence, South Carolina. There's nothing stopping me from saying to the controller, hey, it looks like about a 010 heading for Florence, South Carolina. How does that look to you, sir? And he'll say, fine, fly heading 010 until receiving Florence, South Carolina, clear direct. Lawyers would call that leading the witness. All that is doing is just suggesting to the controller an idea. The controller looks at it, he agrees with you. He doesn't tell you to use your handheld GPS. He simply gives you a vector or gives you a heading and you fly that vector. So really good for situational awareness. I highly recommend if you have a handheld GPS, you do use it for IFR flight but just not use it for your sole source of navigation. Very good way to keep yourself situationally aware. WASP, really all it is and this is something we just enjoy not just in the United States but only in the lower 48. Not too many people in the world have WASP. There's some other iterations that other countries are coming up with. I won't say it's real simple but the whole concept of it is easily explainable. We have the GPS signals coming at us from the GPS satellite constellation that's up there. It gets to the ground and it has some error in it. Granted, it doesn't have very much error in it but what the WASP system does, all it does is there's about two dozen stations across the United States from coast to coast pretty evenly spaced out and there is a master station on the left coast and a master station on the right coast and they take all the signal errors that have been gathered across the country and send a signal up to that one satellite and then that satellite sends a signal back down to your WASP unit that you paid extra for so all those free signals that all the regular people are using you get now a special signal that's your WASP signal it takes out the correction and it gives you something that's highly accurate. Let's see how highly accurate it is. Take a look at VOR navigation. Look at the circle around this airplane that's flying as it's flying and it doesn't want to do that but anyway the circle for VOR navigation is much larger than the wingspan of the airplane. For GPS it comes down, just regular GPS it comes down to about the circle around the wingspan of the airplane and for WASP it's something just about the size of that pointer in the middle of the airplane so we have navigation accuracy all the way down to just a couple of feet with the WASP signal. Quick memory jogger just remember what it is when we're talking about these different approaches and there is these four new types of approaches that you've been flying IFR for decades with only three types of approaches now we all of a sudden got four more piled on. If it has a V in it like LPV or vertical navigation that's a WASP approach and that has vertical guidance associated with it. One gotcha on this that's getting a lot of people is you still have a non-precision approach but you have a vertical guidance on it just like you did on an ILS for you instrument pilots. When you get to the end of that you're their decision altitude, decision height and you've been following vertical guidance all the way down you are not permitted to level out and fly just like on a non-precision approach. It's not a dive and drive it's a do the approach and miss when you get there if you don't see anything. So looks like an ILS, feels like an ILS smells like an ILS but it's not it's still a non-precision approach. Just looking at the types of navigational accuracy that are required for this you hear the term RNP or required navigational performance. In route it's two miles or five miles depending on which branch of a couple different FAA offices we've asked. We've gone with the most conservative two miles. Terminal, we need one mile of accuracy and of course on an approach we need the most accuracy so we're all the way up to three tenths of a mile. GPS approaches have actually made life quite a bit easier we have the basic T shape and virtually all the GPS approaches are like this. We talked about the fly by waypoints versus the fly over waypoints. Notice the difference in this waypoint, this waypoint, the final approach point and then the missed approach is a fly over. These are fly by waypoints and you can see why. We have a 90 degree turn to make here and if we made a 90 degree turn after we crossed the fix we would overshoot. So we make the turn lead the fix and roll out on the final approach course. Of course if we do go miss we do have to do a fly over. Just like any other approach we can request vectors to final or we can request own navigation onto the final approach. We talked before about holding and sequencing. Generally most the GPS units, your active route is the magenta line so if your active route included a holding fix that holding pattern better be colored in the color of your next route or magenta in most cases otherwise you're not gonna be getting good information. Procedure turns or not? This is a time when we do a procedure turn not to get caught up in too much button pushing because there's too much going on at that phase of the approach almost as much as going on in the missed approach phase of the flight and this is where we've identified a lot of accidents particularly recently in some very capable GPS equipped airplanes. There's a lot to do in a missed approach anyway. There's even more to do in a missed approach with GPS if you're trying to keep it going. Good time not to get bogged down in the intricacies when you're near the ground you can't see anything and it's not a good time to be wrapped up in trying to fly the airplane and monitor the GPS and program the GPS. Just a quick recap what if you do screw up the approach? It's no different with GPS. We've all instrument pilots made some mistakes and had to get vectored off an approach for another try. Same thing with GPS. Ask the controller for a vector back on to the approach start the approach again, do it all over again. Whatever you do, like I say there's some incredible capability out there but it's not improving our safety records. So focus on flying the airplane first of course and make sure you know what to do to get yourself out of a situation. Most of the GPS's if you press a button press it again and it's the wrong button press it again it'll take you back to where you were. Make sure you know which is your which is your get out of jail free button for the GPS unit that you're operating in. A good instructor that knows it is invaluable for teaching you how to use it. Manage the whole flight and it's just like everything else. Fly the airplane first have another plan if something goes wrong. Appreciate y'all coming out and having visiting the AOPA Air Safety Foundation Safety Seminar. Fly safe out there and use your GPS for what it was designed for. Thank you very much. Absolutely excellent. Thank you. Thank you JJ. Don't go too far away. We'll just be cutting up here to the roof in just a couple seconds, a couple minutes but thanks again folks. We really do appreciate your participation and we will be, oh we will be. Sorry. Thanks again for your participation and what we're gonna be doing now is going live up to the roof here for our continuing coverage of Sun and Fun. Thank you all. Have a great day. Good job. You know, I can see why so many people are just.