I well remember those Bottlang binders taking up a load of space. I also remember Jeppesen paper IFR charts, the paper was so thin you were lucky if it lasted a cycle, and you couldn’t risk drawing a line on it.
The club still buys the SIA version of the Bottlang books for France and every month someone has to change all the pages that are different since the previous cycle. It’s surprising how many there are.
For IFR the first page of the SIA eAIP lists all the changes since the last cycle and those that are likely to change in the next cycle so you don’t have to actually go into charts to see whether or not there will possibly be changes to your database.
Dan wrote:
My primary tool is SD. In the tooling section, under aircraft, I will choose the one I’ll fly on that day. Since I have previously fed the data to SD, it knows quite precisely my speeds, consumption, etc, on given power settings, and at different levels, for the climb, cruise, and descent phases. My standard altitude is 5K, and I leave it there since it works ok for me, and I’m just to lazy to adjust it for every given flight. It then just just is a matter of choosing, or making sure to use, the correct power setting, and SD will do all the work for you
As usual, the more data the program is given, the more precise the calculations, and actual results will be.
Exactly. SD and other planners are quite excellent these days, always provided the pilot adhers to the power profile which is in the product.
Using Easy VFR I do have 3 preset power curves, High Speed cruise (highest speed settings through the altitudes), Normal Cruise (approx 65%) and LRC (the setting which represents the best range per altitude). In the airplane, we have a sheet with the corresponding settings attached to the check list. That way, pilots can set power according to the profile they have used. If you do that and also cross check fuel flow and TAS from the Aspen, results become very accurate indeed.
Unfortunately what you see a lot is folks which download some profile for their airplane from the Internet, use it but have no idea what power settings it actually corresponds to. These are the ones who usually start bitching that the program is garbage. If they also are of the “that red lever is only there to stop the engine at the end” fraction, errors will be even higher.
Peter wrote:
When I do a longer flight, say EGKA-LDLO, all that matters is this
and the ETA being before LDLO closing time.
Sorry not unless your fuel tank sensors also feed the GPS to crosscheck fuel on board.
In some cases, even big boys found out that totalizer values vs fuel tank values may be slightly off at times….
These guys, with much better instrumentation than we will ever have, did not believe what they were seeing on their fuel gauges until the engines flamed out. Before that, they did not catch a much increased consumption which could only have been seen from the gauges but not from either fuel flow nor totalizers, which do not measure fuel leaks which occur upstream of the transducers. In addition, they also never considered it weird that they had the cross feed open for prolonged times, pumping fuel from the healthy side to the one with the leak while being confronted with low fuel quantities in both tanks.
They were hailed heroes as they landed the A330 like a space shuttle and managed to keep everyone alive though lots of people hurt during the evacuation (without the obvious source of fire a questionable decision too).
Had they caught the fact that they had a leak, they could have easily landed with one engine operating and the other one shut down. Under ETOPS they could even have made Lisbon… Instead they never understood what happened and were so totally blindsighted by what they believed that Capt Piché was totally convinced that when they put power on the airplane on the ground he’d see 17 tons of fuel. Maybe the worst case of tunnel vision I’ve come across in a long time.
So I’d be wary believing a totalizer which you have fed yourself if the rest of the indications don’t add up. Cruise control in an airplane following an operational flight plan include fuel checks in regular intervals which have to be within certain tolerances in order for the flight to continue. Likewise, deviations from EET should be noted and taken into consideration. Believing landing fuel available based on a totalizer can easily result in what
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Using Easy VFR I do have 3 preset power curves, High Speed cruise (highest speed settings through the altitudes), Normal Cruise (approx 65%) and LRC (the setting which represents the best range per altitude). In the airplane, we have a sheet with the corresponding settings attached to the check list. That way, pilots can set power according to the profile they have used.
That’s exactly what I do, too. (Although using SkyDemon.)
If you do that and also cross check fuel flow and TAS from the Aspen, results become very accurate indeed.
That’s also my experience.
Peter wrote:
There is a problem… the wind forecasts are usually way off by a lot more than your TAS calculation
That’s not what I’ve found – on the contrary. I frequently arrive at the destination within a minute or two of the flight planned time, taking into account forecast winds.
As I was introduced to flying at a time where wind forecasts were given as an average over predefined routes or areas and only for certain levels, this still strikes me as amazing.
Where did you find routes given as an average wind. We always had to calculate average winds ny calculating each branch of the route. If you had lots of turns or changes in wind direction then you had lots of calculations to do.
SD and others can do that for you nowadays but back then it was either wizzy wheel or mental calculation. In France they preferred mental calcs. I bought 2 different wizzy wheels for different courses and can count how any times I used them on my fingers.
gallois wrote:
Where did you find routes given as an average wind.
The MET office published route wind forecasts for some predefined routes. This was in the 1980s.
I can’t remember seeing average winds across a whole route. Do you mean average winds across the country at different times of the day and at different altitudes or do you mean on a route?
gallois wrote:
I can’t remember seeing average winds across a whole route. Do you mean average winds across the country at different times of the day and at different altitudes or do you mean on a route?
I actually mean on a route. A typical route was ESSA-EKCH (Stockholm-Copenhagen). There were also average wind forecasts over areas.
The same forecast is still around. E.g. here. (I don’t know if this is a dynamic URL that will become invalid.)
Interesting, I don’t recall meteo de France doing anything like that. Theirs tend to be more graphic and cover the whole country. You then draw your route across that and work out the Ve for each section. Or at least we did before things like SD came into being.
