Flight Service Station

ByHank Gibson

When is the last time you talked to the Flight Service Station?

Believe it or not, FSS is still in existence.  Over the past 10 years, they went from FAA run, the being bought by Lockheed Martin, to now being privately run by a company called Leidos. 1-800-WX Brief will get you connected with a weather briefer, but you’ll hear “Leidos Flight Service Station” now when the briefer picks up.

Since the advent of Foreflight, most pilots these days get their weather briefings digitally on the iPad. Foreflight has come a long way since it’s inception.  The briefing part of their Flights page is quite comprehensive, with lots of information, and counts as a legal weather briefing (which pilots are still required to get before a flight).

Why does a pilot even need to call Flight Service?  Well, when’s the last time you tried to interpret everything the Briefing on Foreflight told you?  As I said before, it’s a lot of information and a lot of it can be confusing.  Pilots are not fully trained on interpreting Prog Charts and getting an overall weather picture for a flight.  A weather briefer is.

I have over 5,000 hours and I still call a weather briefer before almost every flight.  On the way to the airport is a great opportunity to get a weather briefing.  I get a great picture of what’s going on in my area or over my route, frontal movement, bad weather areas, and whether or not it’s a good idea to even take off. Calling in the car alleviates the main complaint I hear about calling the Flight Service Station, which is it’s inconvenient and causes a delay since you have to call them on the phone.

I don’t do much private pilot training anymore, but when I do, I always teach my students how to get a weather briefing from the Flight Service Station.  I’ll show them how to get the briefing on Foreflight too, but usually their eyes bug out of their heads when they start trying to read everything.  A breathe of relief is released when I tell them there is a trained professional just a phone call away who can clear everything up.

The other thing that the Flight Service Station provides that is important to a lot of folks are PIREPs.  It’s vital in sketchy weather areas for the FSS to get a report of what’s actually going on in the air.  This helps other pilots out greatly as they are getting information about icing, cloud bases and tops, turbulence and a myriad of other things from airplanes who are actually in the conditions.

Finally, the most used portion of the Flight Service Station is the Clearance Delivery line (888-766-8267). At airports without a tower or a clearance delivery frequency, with IFR conditions present, the only way to get your IFR clearance is to call Clearance Delivery.  Yes, it can take a little time sometimes, but you will get a clearance every time, unlike taking off and trying to dodge the clouds without hitting anything, while trying to call Center on the radio (which isn’t safe or legal).

Been a while since you’ve talked to the Flight Service Station?  Give them a call, either on the phone or on the radio.  Odds are, they are bored and just wanting someone to talk to, just like you are on that long cross country flight!

Checkout 1800WXBrief.com to see all the cool stuff the Flight Service Station does.

Similar Posts

  • Angle of Attack (AOA)

    ByMike Hostage

    You are hand-flying an in-the-weather descent, power back, heading for the FAF. You start a 30 degree banked turn at your lead point to cross the FAF, when your passenger behind you gasps. Looking over your shoulder, you see he has spilled his drink into his lap…too bad for him! However, when you turn your head back to your panel, your inner ear tumbles and you see 45 degrees of bank, 15 degrees nose low, airspeed increasing.

    Congratulations! You have managed to get distracted and sucked into an unusual attitude recovery. By the book, you should roll wings level, pull to the horizon, and adjust power as necessary to keep the airspeed within limits. In this scenario, if you had not experienced vertigo, you might have been able to roll to less than 30 degrees of bank, recover your turn, pull the nose up to less than the original descent attitude, pulled a bit of power to slow back to your desired penetration speed and then resumed your desired ground track. However, this would only be appropriate if you had full situational awareness as to the deviations caused by the look over your shoulder, plus full confidence that the moderate corrective actions would put you back on your desired flight path.

    As a military aviator, I learned unusual attitude recoveries based upon hard maneuvering at extreme pitch and bank angles. In the hard-maneuvering environment, an unusual attitude could be 90 degrees straight up, airspeed decreasing below 120 kts…or 80 degrees nose low, 135 degrees of bank, airspeed increasing through 500 kts… etc. In these cases, understanding angle of attack, or AOA, is critical to maintaining controlled flight and returning to a normal attitude.

    In an extreme nose-high attitude, a military aviator is trained to roll the aircraft to 90 degrees of bank, ease off the back-stick pressure to reduce AOA, add power as required, and allow the nose to slice back towards level, rolling to wings level as the nose approaches the horizon. If nose low, the recovery procedure is to roll rapidly, within asymmetric g limits, until wings level, then to pull at optimum g loading to recover to level flight. For the nose-low recovery, power was normally reduced until airspeed could be assessed and brought under control. However, when doing the nose-low pullout at 7-9 gs, pulling the power for too long would leave you much to slow to resume combat.

    The AOA gauge on a fighter’s glare shield is a primary reference during hard maneuvering and for landing. The AOA for optimum maneuvering is 13 degrees, displayed as the green circle or “green donut” on the gauge. The red chevron on top represents a slow condition of 15 degrees or more and the yellow lower chevron represents 11 degrees or less.

    For normal landing in the F-16C, the pilot slows to 220 kts and configures abeam the touchdown point while mentally computing the final approach airspeed of 136 kts plus 4 additional knots for each 1000 lbs of fuel. When rolling off the perch and flying the final turn, the pilot would usually only glance once at the airspeed once to ensure final turn airspeed of 180 kts while using the AOA sight gauge as the primary indicator of a best performance turn. As long as the AOA was green donut (13 degrees) or less, you would not stall. If on speed and 13 degrees wasn’t going to get you around the turn to line up with the runway, you knew you were going to overshoot. You never wanted to see the red chevron of 15 degrees or more as that meant you were too slow, pulling too hard, and in danger of building an un-recoverable sink rate!

    Few GA aircraft are currently equipped with AOA indicators, though there are several after market devices available for retrofit. However, knowing the impact of AOA and how to manage it is vital to safe aviating, even without an AOA gauge. The bottom line is, as long as you don’t ask the wing to produce more angle of attack than it can handle, you won’t stall.

    Practicing final turn stalls, to know what the wing feels like as you get too slow or pull too much on the controls, increasing AOA past the critical point, will keep you safe when you encounter that unexpected overshooting wind or you find yourself inadvertently on too tight of a downwind leg. Better to overshoot or take it around to try again, than to pull too hard and exceed critical AOA.

    Mike Hostage is a retired USAF pilot with 37 years of experience, flying a wide variety of aircraft.  An instructor pilot for more than half of his 4800 flight hours, Mike is currently qualified in a Cirrus SR-22T and regularly flies his two homebuilt sailplanes.

  • Cirrus Approach

    ByHank Gibson

    Earlier this year, Cirrus debuted it’s new Learning Management System (LMS), Cirrus Approach. For several years, Cirrus has led the way in online systems training while using several different platforms for it’s LMS. Cirrus Approach is the culmination of lots of sampling and tinkering, and boy, did Cirrus knock it out of the park.

    For those of you unfamiliar with the Cirrus training program, here is the quick rundown. When a pilot who has no Cirrus time buys a Cirrus aircraft, initial transition training is required to familiarize the pilot with the aircraft systems, speeds to fly, power settings, etc. The Cirrus Transition Course is a 3 day that gets a VFR pilot up to speed in the airplane. Under the Cirrus Embark program, those 3 days of training are covered by Cirrus and free to the new owner.

    If the pilot is an IFR pilot, then the 5 day Cirrus Advanced Transition Training Course is required. If the pilot has Cirrus experience, but with a different engine or avionics configuration, there are courses for that too. The Cirrus Embark program covers 3 days of training for most courses for a new Cirrus owner.

    As part of the aforementioned courses, there are systems to learn about and procedures to understand. This is where the Cirrus Approach LMS excels. Cirrus has done a great job of putting together lots of good videos (that are actually interesting but not annoying) on the airplane, systems, how to fly it, etc. for each course. It cuts down greatly on the time that the training instructor has to spend on the ground with the pilot since the pilot has already compiled knowledge through Cirrus Approach.

    Cirrus Approach is accessible online at learning.cirrusapproach.com. To get access to the courses, create an account, then select the Learning Catalog. The courses are categorized based on the type of training (Transition, Advanced Transition, Avionics Differences, Airframe & Powerplant Differences, Recurrent, and Specialty), then further broken down into the type of airplane, engine and avionics (eg. SR22T G6 Perspective+). Make sure the correct engine and avionics configuration is selected! Notice, there is a difference between the SR22T and SR22 (Turbo & Non-Turbo).

    Anyone can do the specialty courses. I would highly recommend for everyone to take the Engine Management course as well as the Icing Awareness Course for you TKS and FIKI operators. The Takeoff & Landing course is a good refresher course for a pilot who hasn’t done any training in a while.

    The Recurrent Training courses are encouraged for all Cirrus pilots. There is an IFR Refresher, a VFR Refresher, and a Skills Refresher. These are recommended to rotate through with a CSIP (Cirrus Standardized Instructor Pilot) on a yearly basis. With a little extra ground, a Flight Review and an IPC can be accomplished yearly using these courses.

    Interested in Initial or Recurrent training in your Cirrus using Cirrus Approach? Contact Texas Top Aviation today!

  • Beware of the Lunch Monster

    ByHank Gibson

    He prowls around, preying on innocent pilots.

    He’s very sneaky, creeping unexpectedly and attacking after the propeller begins to turn.

    He’s very cunning, veiling his intentions until, BOOM, he attacks.

    Beware of the Lunch Monster!

    Whenever I am doing a full day of training (which is usually how transition training courses are planned out, in full day sessions), I always plan a lunch stop.  My metabolism has the speed of a rocket ship, so I get hungry and need some sustenance in the middle of the day.  I have a running list of airports to stop at that have good lunch spots at them or nearby, so my customers and I usually end up at one of those airports.

    Almost without fail, if a customer is having an excellent flying morning, nailing all the procedures, picking up all the techniques, and overall, flying pretty well, then eats lunch, the afternoon doesn’t go quite as well.  Doing some of the same things we did that morning, but the customer’s performance isn’t quite as good.  Most of the time, it’s just a brain lockup or landings aren’t quite as squeaky as they were in the morning.

    Part of it is fatigue after flying for 2-3 hours in the morning.  The other part is what I call the Lunch Monster.  Eating a big lunch can sap away brain power and cause a person to lose energy around 2-3pm, leading to an afternoon lull (or the Lunch Monster attacking!).

    According to Forbes.com:

    Diet contributes to energy levels too. “Eating a lunch that is too big is the most common reason for feeling sleepy in the afternoon,” says Rebecca Solomon a nutritionist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. “All your energy goes into digesting the enormous meal.”

    The goal is to keep the body’s Cortical and Cortisone levels even since they’re the hormones released by the body in reaction to stress–they produce the fight or flight response. Their levels are elevated when you have sugar, caffeine and processed food, so you feel awake and energetic. But a few hours later, when those levels drop, you’re sluggish.

    Solomon recommends eating a meal that’s balanced with healthy fats (from olive oil or avocados, for instance) with protein and healthy carbohydrates (whole wheat bread or pasta). The portion will vary for people of different sizes, but a general rule is you should be hungry about four hours after the meal.

    Another healthy eating habit: Consume small portions of foods throughout the day, including almonds, carrots and hummus and fruit. Enjoy lunch around 1:30 or 2 p.m., just before the time you normally feel fatigued.

    Now, most of the stops on my list of restaurants don’t fit the bill of healthy fats and healthy carbohydrates (plenty of protein, though, especially the BBQ joints).  For those days, bringing along a snack like almonds or dried fruit is a great idea to munch on mid-afternoon.  Trimming down the amount eaten at lunch helps a lot too.

    So, the next time you have a long day of flying or training, beware the lunch monster and prep some good snacks when your flight instructor says you’re stopping for BBQ!

  • Fly Away Destination: Sedona, AZ (KSEZ)

    ByHank Gibson

    Looking for somewhere to take a trip this fall?  Sedona, Arizona should warrant strong consideration.  Just shy of 100 miles north of Phoenix, Sedona is one of the most beautiful areas in the southwest United States.  From Texas, depending on how fast your airplane travels, you could make it to Sedona in a day, with a couple of stops in between.  You’d definitely want to spend a few days to enjoy the scenery and maybe jump over to the Grand Canyon while you’re in the area.

    The Airport

    As you approach the Sedona Airport (KSEZ), you become somewhat distracted by the scenery around you.  Don’t be too distracted as the approach is a little tricky.  If you are landing north, on Runway 3, the calm wind runway, don’t let the surroundings fool you.  Stay on that PAPI and don’t be short, as the runway is on a 500 foot mesa.  In instrument conditions, the MDA for the RNAV approach to Runway 3 dumps you out about 1,300 feet above the airport elevation, giving you plenty of time to set up to land.

    When using runway 21, don’t make your pattern too wide as there are some pretty tall rocks (around 7,000 feet) north of the field.  The Airport/Facilities Directory gives a warning to pilots in strong southwesterly wind conditions.  Be aware of strong downdrafts coming in on final for runway 21.

    The runway itself is in excellent condition, and plenty long at just over 5,000 feet.  The FBO is a little dated, but the folks there are great.  They were redoing the ramp this summer, so beware of that.  Airplane parking is no problem, but actually getting to the FBO is a little tricky.  The Mesa Grill is a very nice good restaurant just a short walk from the FBO.  When I was there, I chowed down on a buffalo burger.  It definitely hit the spot.

    What To Do

    Sedona is the outdoorsman’s paradise.  Starting off, to get a great overview of the area, hop on the Red Rock Scenic Byway (SR 179) about an hour before dusk.  You’ll get to see some spectacular views while it’s still light, then you can’t beat the sunsets in Sedona.

    For hiking, you have a myriad of options, from the Cathedral Rock, to the Oak Creek Canyon, to the Devil’s Bridge Trail, all are beautiful, though most are not for the faint of heart (especially the Devil’s Bridge).  Even though the fall is cooler, make sure you pack plenty of water for the hikes.

    Sedona

    Want something to do in the evening?  Go up to the Chapel of the Holy Cross to watch the sunset.  After the sun goes down, go do some stargazing.  You’ll get to take a tour of the stars at the Sedona Star Gazing location in Oak Creek.  You are shown all the constellations and stars by professional astronomers, and blankets and chairs are provided.

    Art connoisseur?  You’ll find plenty of art galleries around town with a ton of beautiful, original artwork.  There are also several theaters and golf courses around Sedona, giving everyone a little bit of everything.

    If you’re up for it, the Grand Canyon is about a 2 hour drive north of Sedona, or a quick flight up to the Grand Canyon Airport (KGCN).

    In search of a good getaway?  Try Sedona.  You’ll be sore from lots of hiking and sight seeing, but it will definitely have been worth it.

  • Jet A Fueling Mismanagement

    ByHank Gibson

    I’m sure at this point, most pilots in Texas have heard about the Cessna 421 that went down two weeks ago in Lufkin.  The Golden Eagle suffered a dual engine failure (the pilot lost the first at 2300 feet, then the second at 1700 feet) in IMC on climb out.  He broke out at 1,000 AGL miraculously lined up with US 59, south of the Lufkin airport.  The pilot had to dodge a car as he was attempting his landing, stalled the airplane, sheared off the landing gear, then slid into the median.  No one died, but lots of bumps and bruises.  All were airlifted to Houston.

    Jet A Lufkin Plane Crash

    The cause was a lineman at LFK put Jet A in the 421, which is a piston airplane and takes 100LL Avgas.  The story that I saw said the pilot and two passengers were returning to Houston from Kansas City and diverted to LFK due to weather.  They landed in driving rain and spent the night.  I have not seen any reports saying whether the pilot sumped the tanks or not the following morning.

    There were several factors that led to this accident.  If you take one factor out, the accident probably wouldn’t have happened.  Let’s take a look at the sequence of events.

    The 421 arrived in a driving rain storm, so the pilot and passengers probably disembarked quickly to get out of the weather.  Factor number 1 presents itself here.  We don’t know whether or not the pilot told the lineman to put Avgas in it or not (he may have just said fill it up), so we’ll leave that aside.

    Understandably, the pilot dashed inside to get out of the rain, but they neglected to monitor the fueling.  Whether or not the fueling took place that night or the next morning, we can’t say.  I have started to greatly encourage my customers to monitor the fueling of their airplanes, especially when it’s a fuselage that can either have Avgas piston engines or Jet A turboprops, as is the case with the Cessna 421.

    Factor number 2, we already know about.  The lineman messed up and put the wrong fuel in.  If their was uncertainty about what type of fuel, he would have been prudent to await the return of the pilot to ask, even if that meant delaying the pilot’s departure.

    Factor number 3 is the matter of sumping the fuel.  We don’t know if the pilot sumped the fuel or not. The tricky thing about sumping is Jet A doesn’t settle out of Avgas like water does unless it sits for a long, long time.  The two ways to determine if you have Jet A in your Avgas airplane are to smell it, as Jet A has a very strong diesel smell, or do the paper towel test.  The paper towel test consists of dumping a fuel sample onto a paper towel, then let the Avgas evaporate.  If you are left with a nasty, oily residue, you’ve got Jet A in your tanks (not to mention it will smell like diesel).

    To prevent misfueling of your airplane, take the following steps:

    • Be specific in telling the lineman what type of fuel you want, not just “fill ‘er up”
    • Monitor the fueling and watch which truck pulls up to your airplane
      • This is especially important with fuselages that can have either Pistons or Turbo-Prop engines, like the PA-46 line or the Twin Cessna line
    • Always sump your fuel, definitely smell it, and if there are any doubts, try a paper towel test

  • Upgrading Avionics

    ByHank Gibson

    There are many different ways to upgrade an instrument panel.  Putting in a 696 here, a JPI engine monitoring system there, even an Electronic HSI.  But, if you want to swing for the fences and get a serious upgrade, you have to go for a complete glass instrument panel.  For good measure, you might as well throw in a touch screen GPS while you are at it.

    Which panel to go with?  There are two mainstream options (Garmin and Aspen) and a handful of other companies that make glass panel replacements (Avidyne being one, King for a short period of time at the end of the last decade being another with the KFD 840).  Around 2010, there were a lot of companies trying to get into the glass panel retrofit game, but many of the products didn’t gain a whole lot of popularity, leaving Garmin and Aspen at the top of the heap.

    What about the touch screen GPS market?  Garmin has this pretty much cornered as well, with Avidyne and King just getting into the game.  The gap between Garmin’s GTN series and Avidyne and King is pretty wide.

    Garmin GTN Series

    The answer is pretty easy when it comes to the GPS (go with Garmin!), but not so easy when it comes to the panel.  The G500 and the Aspen Evolution series are both excellent interfaces with strong reliability, so which one do you go with?  Feature-wise, both have a lot of the same features: traffic, weather, terrain, synthetic vision, to name a few.  The presentation for each feature is a little different between the two interfaces.  It just depends on what you like better.

    The nice thing about the Aspen system is you can go glass, but you have options on how much glass you want:  1 screen, 2 screens, or 3 screens?  With the single screen PFD, you have all your instrumentation, traffic, weather, and optional synthetic vision.  You don’t need the synthetic vision for the traffic and weather, as it shows up behind your HSI.  It is an honest to goodness glass panel retrofit.

    When you decide to upgrade to 2 screens, this is where Aspen has a leg up.  The second screen is a completely redundant PFD and, if you get the 2 hour emergency backup battery installed, acts as the backup instrumentation to the main PFD.  This means you can take out the old steam gauge standby instruments.  This helps clean the panel up.

    I personally don’t see the need for 3 screens, but maybe there is someone out there who needs it.

    One selling point that Aspen has over Garmin is the wide variety of autopilots and GPS units that Aspen units are compatible with.  The G500 is only compatible with King autopilots, it’s own GFC 700 autopilot (which would be a retrofit), some Collins autopilots, and the Century 21, 31, 41, and 2000.  This does cover a wide array of autopilots, but it keeps some on the outside.  Aspen, on the other hand, is compatible with most autopilots on the market.

    Finally, let’s talk price.  Going with an Aspen EFD 1000 PFD (this is the single screen Aspen) will run you somewhere in the area of $12,000.  The price will vary based on the shop and the airplane.  When you want to add a screen, it’s an additional $6,000.  This is for the base, so if you want to add weather or synthetic vision, it’ll run you a little more.

    The Garmin G500 comes in around $20,000, again depending on the shop and the airplane.  The screens are bigger on the G500, which is kind of nice, and you are buying a Garmin product, which has a fabulous track record in the aviation industry.

    Decisions, decisions.  There really is no wrong answer here.  Both are excellent products with very good track records.  Both have really nice features and don’t hardly fail.  Really, the choice comes down to what you want.

    Need training on your upgraded GPS or glass panel retrofit?  Contact Texas Top Aviation for thorough training on your new avionics today.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *