Green needles
Over the past year and a half, I have been spoiled. The Barbie jet is an easy plane to fly and the FMS practically does everything for you. It takes care of our routing, flight planning, weight and balance numbers, company communications, performance numbers, fuel planning and a host of other things. Mental fuel calculations are a thing of the past. To check the fuel status all that needs to be done is press a button. A screen will pop up on the MFD that gives you everything you wanted to know about your fuel situation. How much you are burning, how much you have used, how much you will use to your next checkpoint, how much to destination, how much to your alternate, how much you have left over until you hit reserve fuel. Lets say that the alternate is not looking good, it will calculate your fuel burn from your destination to a new alternate. Anything you need to know can be calculated with a few button pushes. When the FMS is broken, a lot of things are lost.
It just so happened that recently I flew a plane without the FMS and ACARS (our way of communicating with the company through text messages). Lets just say those flights were busy. We call those flights Green Needle flights because without the added benefit of the FMS and its GPS navigation, we basically have the same navigational capabilities as an IFR Certified Cessna 152. On our display screens, any time we are using VHF navigation, the needles we see are green, hence the nickname of a Green Needle flight. All we have to navigate with is dual VHF Navs. My Dads Bonanza with his Garmin 430 has better navigational capabilities. Having no FMS means we do not have the ability to go direct to anything except VOR's that are in range. In order to navigate, we need to do it the old fashioned way by getting out our paper maps and doing some good old knob twisting to stay on course. Our entire route needs to be checked against the map to see that we can do it. We pretty much need to stay on the Jet Routes because the service volumes of the VORs need to be taken in to account in case we are doing any off route navigation. Either that or ATC needs to treat us like a DC-9 and give us vectors everywhere. This morning I happened to catch a mistake by our dispatcher. The way he had us filed, we could not comply with his routing. The route started off using a Jet Route, but over eastern PA, it started taking us off the airway and going intersection to intersection. With an FMS, no problem, but without one, we couldn't do it. So I had to call dispatch to have them re-file us along some airways. Several times during each flight ATC would clear us direct to a fix that we were unable to go directly to. We would just have to tell them unable, or have them vector us. In all actuality, it was kind of refreshing to fly the old fashioned way. It reminded me of my single pilot 135 freight days when I had to do everything myself. Everything from getting atis over the radio to using maps to navigate. Having a glass cockpit really spoils you.
It just so happened that recently I flew a plane without the FMS and ACARS (our way of communicating with the company through text messages). Lets just say those flights were busy. We call those flights Green Needle flights because without the added benefit of the FMS and its GPS navigation, we basically have the same navigational capabilities as an IFR Certified Cessna 152. On our display screens, any time we are using VHF navigation, the needles we see are green, hence the nickname of a Green Needle flight. All we have to navigate with is dual VHF Navs. My Dads Bonanza with his Garmin 430 has better navigational capabilities. Having no FMS means we do not have the ability to go direct to anything except VOR's that are in range. In order to navigate, we need to do it the old fashioned way by getting out our paper maps and doing some good old knob twisting to stay on course. Our entire route needs to be checked against the map to see that we can do it. We pretty much need to stay on the Jet Routes because the service volumes of the VORs need to be taken in to account in case we are doing any off route navigation. Either that or ATC needs to treat us like a DC-9 and give us vectors everywhere. This morning I happened to catch a mistake by our dispatcher. The way he had us filed, we could not comply with his routing. The route started off using a Jet Route, but over eastern PA, it started taking us off the airway and going intersection to intersection. With an FMS, no problem, but without one, we couldn't do it. So I had to call dispatch to have them re-file us along some airways. Several times during each flight ATC would clear us direct to a fix that we were unable to go directly to. We would just have to tell them unable, or have them vector us. In all actuality, it was kind of refreshing to fly the old fashioned way. It reminded me of my single pilot 135 freight days when I had to do everything myself. Everything from getting atis over the radio to using maps to navigate. Having a glass cockpit really spoils you.
posted by Windsor at 2:10 PM
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