What a waste!
Peter,
There will always be many NDB approaches, especially in S Europe – because an NDB is the cheapest way of making an airport “IFR”
Can you point me to some airports in southern Europe which have NDB approaches only?
MarcelK wrote:
So, in real world IFR, when you get an NDB as waypoint, you dial it into the GPS? ;-)
Yes, that is how it works. It is fully legal and the only practical way to navigate accurately to a NDB.
I often get “PROCEED DIRECT LLS” when still 150NM out. I start receiving the NDB only at about 15NM out.
Can you point me to some airports in southern Europe which have NDB approaches only?
LDLO LDSB – that’s just 30 seconds.
EGHE, which one of our posters here will be awfully familiar with 
There are many more with a VOR approach where the VOR performs an enroute duty / the EU is paying for it (LGST and many others)
Basically you can buy an NDB for something like €10k and the maintenance contract is of the order of a few k a year. A VOR is somewhere in the hundreds of k to install.
It costs something like €30-50k to get a GPS approach designed, though there have been outfits (Slovakia – past threads here) which apparently do it for a bit less. But if this doesn’t give you a lower MDA and everybody flies it with GPS anyway, the drive to spend the money is nil. The only remaining advantage of a GPS approach then is that it gives you a shorter track distance, by avoiding the outboung leg. France has put in loads of GPS approaches because these are centrally funded, as a national strategy. The airport itself would not bother. LPV gives you a much lower MDA but almost nobody can fly LPV, especially not the AOC ops running down there (regional turboprops).
Peter wrote:
Agreed, and same for VORs.
I still firmly believe every IFR pilot should be competent to navigate with the help of VORs as a backup for the day that GPS is jammed/degraded/manipulated. Apparently, Russia has done extensive GPS jamming in the Ukraine conflict, which has been somewhat of a wakeup call to the US and their overreliance on a functioning GPS system. One can argue that it may never happen, but teaching pilots to only ever rely on GPS is not smart IMHO.
Doesn’t everyone who is “IFR” have VOR capability anyway? All the GNS/GTN/IFD boxes have it. The King KX radios all have it (and it would be silly to have one of those without the ILS option). Also AFAIK a VOR receiver has been mandatory equipment carriage for IFR from Day 1 (except nowadays in the USA where a “W” GPS gets around that).
lenthamen wrote:
When ATC assigns you an ndb in the enroute phase of the flight, the chance that you can actually receive it is close to zero.
From Toussus (LFPN) there is a departure that involves turning > 90° to intercept the POY (Orly LFPO) NDB outbound. The departure is not coded in the Jepp database. During my IR revalidation in March I diligently dialed in the NDB and identified the NDB prior to departure. We took off, and at 4 NM or whatever it was, initiated the left turn out to intercept the track from POY. To my great surprise the needle was not pointing in the right direction so I established myself on some parallel track. The examiner told me he expected that to happen because the signal was too weak, and showed me a trick he used to avoid the issue, which was to load another procedure (a POGO) which had the correct track coded… And Orly is not that far away from Toussus.
An alternative would have been to dial in DCT POY (on the GPS) and used the OBS to select the track.
Peter wrote:
There will always be many NDB approaches, especially in S Europe – because an NDB is the cheapest way of making an airport “IFR”
Surely an RNAV approach is cheaper. In both cases you have to pay someone to design the approach, but you down need any hardware on the ground for RNAV.
True but these are old-established existing approaches.
Very few airports in Europe are acquiring new IFR capability.
Many of those who would like it don’t have a suitable runway. For example, Redhill EGKR tried to get a hard runway and they already have ATC so IAPs would be “easy” but the airport which would lose business (Biggin Hill EGKB) objected, and the application got squashed.
Also every AOC operator can fly an NDB approach, but most (of the relevant ones) can’t fly a GPS approach.
Hi guys, anyone here who already passed the E-IR pracitcal exam? I’m looking for anyone who wants to share experiences…
What exactly do you want specific to the E-IR (vs regular IR. CBIR is the same practical is regular IR, only different theory)?
I did the CB-IR.
Have you read the CAA document regarding practical tests? http://publicapps.caa.co.uk/docs/33/Standards%20Doc%201%20v9_Nov%202014.pdf
Since it’s EASA rating, I imagine the test standard should be relatively the same in europe.
Looking at it, it looks like you’d have something like: IFR pick up (getting clearance, likely in the air), I imagine some tracking (maybe ADF), a diversion, some limited panel. They’ll also want to see you focus on checks (such as no ice), and probably good checking of weather brief and you to explain how you’d remain VFR.
