Training & Safety

1. FAAsafety.gov – home to the Wings program, listings of aviation events, courses and seminars, the Learning Center and much more.
2. SPANS – sign up here to get into the FAASafety.gov system and receive notifications of events, participate in the Wings program, etc.
3. Aviation learning Center – Search here for lots of great aviation information – courses, documents, etc.
4. On Landings Part 1 – Part 1 of a series looking at common landing errors and how to fix them, co-authored and illustrated by William Kershner
5. On Landings Part 2
6. On Landings Part 3
7. FAA.gov – main FAA website with lots and lots of information, including downloadable PDF manuals and handbooks
8. AOPA Air Safety Foundation – many great safety resources
9. Nall Report – Analysis of accident causes and trends for 2007.
10. ASF interactive courses – flash-based tutorials covering weather, communication, charts and much more.

Preflight

1. Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS) – the main government weather site for aviation.
2. Navmonster.com – Another alternative site for weather data, can be advert-heavy.
3. AeroWeather – Free iPhone app for Metar and Taf data
4. Skyvector.com – Explore sectionals, area charts and IFR charts using google maps interface – weather and route planning also.
5. NACO digital Terminal Procedures Publications (d-TPP) – Download PDFs of IFR approach plates, SIDS, STARS, airport diagrams, A/FD pages, Chart Users Guide.
6. AOPA Airports guide for iPhone (AOPA Members only)
7. Google Earth – Review your airport and route in 3D and with satellite imagery, also for the iPhone
8. AOPA Flight Planner (AOPA Members only)

Social Networking sites for Aviation

1. AOPA Forums (AOPA Members Only)
2. Studentpilot.com Bulletin Board – active forums on a wide variety of topics
3. Facebook – Many aviation groups and sites including EAA, Skyvector
4. Oshkosh365 – EAA’s social networking site, for EAA members and non-members, blogs and great weather display
5. Twitter – micro-blogging in 140 characters or less, follow the #OSH09 hash tag, my tweets: @simon_t
6. AvWeb YouTube video clip of A380 cross-wind landing
7. Twitter Stream Graphs of #OSH09 tags (created using Neoformix.com StreamGraph tool)
8. Blogs – too many to mention individually but check out bloggingpilots.com for a list of many great sites.
9. Podcasts – lots of these too, try searching iTunes for ‘pilot’ and/or ‘aviation’
10. UND Aerocast – video tutorials demonstrating many flight maneuvers, instrument technique and more

I’ll be compiling a list of the websites and resources that I mention (and some of the many that I cant fit in) so that people don’t have to take notes, plus it will be handy for people who cant make it. I will remember to use laser pointer and to bring the remote control and other accessories that help these things go more smoothly. Hopefully the screenshots, etc. will be visible on the projectors… we shall see!

Simon.

Airventure 2009

If you are going to be at Airventure in Oshkosh in a couple of weeks, I’m giving a presentation entitled Internet for Pilots, to Twitter and beyond! on Wednesday, July 27th. It will be in the Utah Valley University Pavillion from 4 to 5.15pm.

I’ll be covering some of the great Internet resources out there for pilots at all stages in their aviation career: training and safety, weather, flight planning, charts and navigation and more. I’ll go into some of the cool new mobile applications coming out for the iphone and talk about how social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and others can be great tools to stay in touch with aviation even when you aren’t at the airport.

I’m going to try and work in some observations I have made over the years of test prep results from preparetotest.com – there are some questions and topics people keep getting wrong as they are learning to fly and these are often areas critical to flight safety that continue to cause problems in the pilot community after folks are licensed. I’m going to highlight some of these along with the resources that can help

If you are going to be in Oshkosh, drop me an email or I’m on Twitter as @simon_t, it would be great to meet up!

Here’s the current draft of the contents and some of the main sites I’ll be talking about. Clearly there are many other great sites, blogs, podcasts, etc. out there and I cant cover them all – please don’t be offended if your favorite site isn’t on this list. That being said, if you have other sites you think everyone really should know about, I’d love to hear about them. Time is limited for the talk so I may already have more than enough to cover but I can always keep a longer list online.

• FAASafety.gov & the WINGS program
• Resources for Training – Safety & Education
  • AOPA – Air Safety Foundation, FlightTraining magazine
  • FAA – Handbooks, Manuals, Library, FAA Safety.gov, NASA ASRS
  • Licensing/Test Prep – Sportys, PrepareToTest (RSS feeds), MyWrittenExam, etc.
  • Aerodynamics – See How it Flys, John Denker,
  • Online nav simulators – E6B Sims, VOR Sims
  • Podcasts & Videos – UND Aerocast, The Finer Points (audio & video), Airspeed, UCAP, Pilots Flight PodLog, Pilots Journey
• Preflight – resources to help you get ready to fly and keep you informed en route
  • Weather – ADDS, Aviation Weather
  • Airport Information – d-TERPS, A/FD online, AirNav, AOPA Airport Directory (iPhone)
  • Navigation – Planners (EAA, AOPA, DUATS)
  • Charts – Skyvector, NACO, NACO Charts User guide
  • iPhone Apps – Weather, Flight planning, etc.
• Postflight – Online hanger flying, community building and more
  • Facebook – EAA Groups
  • Twitter  – #OSH09, #pilot, #aviation
  • Oshkosh 365
  • AOPA Members Forums
  • StudentPilot.com
  • Blogs – Blogging Pilots, AOPA Lets go Flying, GirlsWithWings

What is the point of something like this? Well, firstly I wanted to explore using Twitter as a way to send and recieve other types of information, not just personal messages. Secondly, I wanted a way to quickly get weather information on my phone when I was away from my computer and an internet connection. I’m using an iPhone so I can get radar and all the other great info from sites like ADDS but sometimes you dont want to wait for it all to load (or its too slow), you just want the information without having to spend an age browsing to find it.

Enter Mr Tweet

What really got me thinking about this was the message I got back when I signed up with MrTweet, a twitter-based service that suggests other twitterers who you might be interested in following, based on your interests and those of your followers. I dont have the actual message handy but it was something like ‘Hi there! Mr. Tweet, your personal Twitter assistant, is ready for work‘. Now this is just a message from a computer but the whole ‘ready for work’ part really got me thinking. How could I use this type of approach as a way to put a simple interface onto a more complex system housed on a server somewhere? Many people use twitter via the standard web interface or tools such as Tweetdeck, Twhirl and similar desktop applications. If I’m sitting at my desktop I can build a normal web page or use existing sites to get the information I need so that’s not quite so exciting. However, the integration of Twitter with SMS text messages allows you to break free of the internet connection if you want.

Using twitter you have the ability to use send text messages from your phone to some standard Twitter phone numbers in order to send public tweets and also direct messages to others. This provides a simple, flexible cellphone-based front end to a twitter-based messaging system. If you combine this with a script that uses the Twitter API to monitor incoming tweets and DMs sent to a particular Twitter account and which acts on the instructions contained in these messages you have a twitterbot that can do just about anything you want.

Whither the Weather?

As a pilot the weather is always a important factor, I check the aviation weather reports regardless of whether Im flying or not as its often faster than looking a the local TV and it gives me data I can use and interpret myself. The practical benefit of @av8nwx is that I can use SMS on my phone to text a DM to the account and then receive a SMS back on my phone when @av8nwx DMs me the weather information. This is a pretty convenient way to get weather info in some situations. I can also use Tweetie or Twitterific on the iPhone but composing a DM on those is slower than quickly sending a DM via a SMS text message.

Currently the bot will return METAR and TAF reports for stations which provide these reports (List of international METAR stations). It could probably do a lot more  things, the only restriction being the 140 character input and output limits and cost of text messages:

Its not going to return graphical data (though it could send back a URL to that data). Currently you have to send in a new request to get new data – with some more coding it could be set up to send things like:

• the next 3 metars for a particular station
• alert you if the current winds (in the METAR report) got above/below a certain speed: ‘set windalert if kord morethan 15‘ might check the KORD metar periodically and send you a DM if the wind went above 15kts
• alert if thunderstorms were in the forecast at a station(s) you were interested in, etc.
• It could do E6B conversions ’6 gal fuel = ? lb’
• crosswind components (‘xwind rwy 22 kmwc’) using the current METAR wind reports

Currently its pretty basic but it does work, the av8nwx page describes how to set it up and the commands you can currently use.  I’d be really interested in any opinions people might have and suggestions for other things that it could do to help provide some useful additional information to the aviation community.

Disclaimer: every effort is made to provide current, up to date weather information but this is experimental and there are most likely bugs and hence this should not be used as a replacement for an official weather briefing. It can be useful to provide enhanced situational awareness but should be used in concert with other approved information sources such as those provided by the Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS), DUATS and other FAA approved weather providers.

As its getting closer to Saturday and the forecasts will start to be closer to reality, I’m looking at ADDS (Aviation Digital Data Service, http://adds.aviationweather.noaa.gov) to see what’s in store. For this type of time frame, 36 hours out, I start on the Prog (Prognostic) Charts and see what’s going on. Here’s an overview of all the current charts:

Even at this resolution you can see there’s a Low pressure over east-central Canada that’s dragging a cold front through the north central states and as the Low moves to the east, that cold front is going to start dropping down into the midwest and potentially messing up our plans. Here’s the current 48 hour forecast:

I’m using the 48h chart rather than the 36h chart because the valid time of the 48h chart is around about my planned departure time of 0830 CDT on Sat June 6th.

Looking at the current chart things dont look clean cut. We’re flying from SE Wisconsin to North Central Illinois and on this map the cold front should have just passed through. The solid green line indicates that SW WI and NW IL will have a 30-50% chance of some precipitation, though the real stuff is on the north western side of IA. The Low in eastern Iowa is on an stationary front (changing to a cold front in Northern IL, indicated by the two yellow lines across the front) and the isobars dont look too close together so its not likely to be very windy. To me (and Im thinking out loud, quite likely to be wrong!) this might suggest we’re going to have some clouds to think about. We’ll be around 4,500′ on the way out (westbound) and probably 3,500′ on the way back (eastbound) so they may be higher than us (hopefully, C152 isnt really my ideal IFR platform and Im not current at the moment)

So, that’s where we are at this stage of the game but everything will change as tomorrow progresses. Things Im going to look for: progress of the Canadian low and its cold front, visibility in northern IL ahead of the cold front. The Milwaukee (KMKE) and Rockford TAFs (KRFD) will start to become relevant tomorrow as their 30h forecasts start to reach our flight times on Saturday morning so I’ll look again tomorrow night and we should have a better idea of what’s going on.

I hope things are decent enough – I picked up a Sony Webbie HD camcorder from BestBuy this afternoon and the plan is to strap this to the top of the passenger seat and videotape the trip – we’ll see how it goes! Grrr – while making the link to the camera on Amazon I found it has an undocumented ‘feature’, a 25min maximum record time, how annoying is that! You have to restart the video every 25mins, it’s not the end of the world but not what you really want. I do like the swivelling head…well, we’ll see, this bad boy may be heading back to the store and I’ll end up with the Flip UltraHD after all…

I’ve include a screenshot of the planned route, below. Essentially we’ll take off and head west to Badger VOR (BAE) then turn southwest and head direct to C77. This route takes us clear of Waukesha’s Class D and makes life a little easier than threading the needle between the Class D and Class C that you have to do if you go direct from KMWC.

I’m going to be taking one of the venerable Cessna 152′s and will be bringing up the rear of the flight. We like to have the faster planes take off first so that spacing is always increasing, rather than everyone coming in on top of each other. Personally I have never visited C77 before but you hear a lot of people on the unicom flying out of there so I knew it was pretty popular. On closer examination, Poplar Grove has a lot of interesting aviation things going on. C77 was featured in the AOPA’s ‘A day in the life of….’ series and there they mention the fly-in community and the Wings and Wheels museum amongst other things.

The A/FD entry is shown below (courtesy of the NACO online AFD), one main runway 12-30 and two grass strips, 17-35 and 9-27 so we should have plenty of landing options, assuming the sod runways are open when we get there.

Using the ever useful Google maps, here’s what it looks like from above, this image was taken in 2009 so hopefully is about right. I did a practice flight the other night using X-plane and that was pretty handy, though the generic scenery wasnt very life-like as it showed the airport in the middle of fields, no roads, hangers, buildings, etc. to be seen. That would be a good project for a scenery designer…

Later this week it will be time to start paying some attention to the weather and the forecasts to see what we’re likely to be facing on Saturday morning. For now I’ll just review the sectional and get familiar with the route and the things we’re likely to see along the way. If anyone wants to have a look at this part of the world, and the airports we’re going to be using you can them on the Chicago sectional via SkyVector: KMWC (Timmerman), C77 (Poplar Grove) If you go looking, you get extra points for correctly identifying the type of airspace overlying Rockford (KRFD) to the south west of C77 – answers in the comments please!

Simon.

So way back in 1999 I got my Private Pilot’s license with my instrument rating the following year. It seems like I’ve been working on my Commercial ever since – real life has conspired to make finding the time to get that done rather hard. Taking a different tack, last year I passed my Instrument Ground Instructor and now I’m working on my Advanced Ground Instructor – the goal is to have that completed before Oshkosh. I hope to be chatting about progress towards that goal and other bits and pieces as I go along.

So, thanks for stopping by and hopefully there will be more to see here when you return!

• Logging into http://faasafety.gov
• Navigating to your My Wings page
• Finding the seminar or event you attended
• Finding a validator who can confirm your attendance at that event
• Submitting the request to the validator

This video presumes that you already have an account on faasafety.gov as that is now a prerequisite for being able to get into the WINGS system and manage your progress. If you are an Airman of any type (Pilot, AMT, flight engineer, etc) and do not yet have an account on the site it is well worth getting signed up, not just for WINGS but also to be able to take safety courses and other things. The AMT side of the site is going to be spruced up significantly in the near future so it will have more useful content for maintenance folks too. You can register for an account here: https://www.faasafety.gov/login/reg/Register.aspx

Validating WINGS credits on FAASAFETY.gov from Simon Twigger on Vimeo

If you have any questions or comments on this video or its contents I would love to hear them, please pop them into the comment field below.

To help address the problem of runway incursions the FAA co-produced a DVD in conjunction with the Airline Pilots Association and United Airlines. This video is reproduced below and focuses on runway safety best practices for commercial operations at towered and non-towered airports.

Even though its focus is Commercial operations the lessons are the same for general aviation so its still well worth watching. The video is around 31 minutes long.

The FAA have a dedicated site for Runway Safety issues here: http://www.faa.gov/runwaysafety/

The Pilots Best Practices for airport safety are as follows:

1. Encourage use of correct terminology and proper voice cadence
2. Eliminate distractions in the operational area.
3. Obtain and use airport diagrams. Use the FAA runway safety website to find airport diagrams for all airports.
4. Conduct “Clearing Turns” prior to entering ANY runway.
5. Maintain a sterile cockpit when taxiing.
6. Maintain appropriate Taxi speed.
7. Encourage pilots to have their “eyes out” when taxiing.
8. Encourage pilots to have a “heads up” policy when taxiing.
9. Attend safety seminars and programs on RUNWAY SAFETY.
10. Improve safety by teaching, advocating, stressing and understanding situational awareness.
11. Customize RUNWAY SAFETY presentations for targeted audiences such as pilot organizations, safety seminars, airport authorities, etc.
12. Cite specific airport RUNWAY SAFETY web pages.
13. Distribute RUNWAY SAFETY materials to every aviation entity.
14. Package and distribute runway safety materials to: Flight Schools, Flight Safety International, Maintenance Centers, Aircraft Manufacturers, etc.
15. Realize that every airport is unique and presents its own set of RUNWAY SAFETY challenges.
16. Stay alert; stay alive.
17. Declare war on errors; make it everyone’s responsibility.

http://www.faa.gov/news/aviation_news/2008/media/MarApr2008.pdf

You can find more information on FAA Aviation News, links to their past editions and info on how to subscribe to their print edition here:

http://www.faa.gov/news/aviation_news/