Without a doubt, the biggest single factor affecting your planning for an IFR flight is the weather, but you can drive yourself right up the 64
wall worrying about it too far in advance of your trip. At 48 hours be- fore takeoff time, the very best the weather people can do is give you a general idea of weather conditions; at 24 hours, the forecasts become more accurate, but in most cases, you can’t really obtain a good picture until just before takeoff. (Of course, this is weather in- formation for planning purposes; you should always be checking a tight weather situation right up until you walk out to the airplane and continue checking it enroute.) Always be thinking of some alternative course of action in case the weather gets worse than you can put up with. If the forecasts are filled with doom and gloom, reserve an air- line seat, plan to drive, or make arrangements to go another day.
When it looks as if the weather is going to put you between a rock and a hard place, get out the instrument charts to determine whether you can make it under the freezing level with respect to the minimum IFR altitudes or whether there is a convenient detour avail- able. Do you have the range to make it nonstop? Does the destina- tion airport have an approach good enough for the weather that is forecast? Don’t take it for granted that all ILS approaches will bring you down to 200 feet and a half mile; there are a number of them that have much higher minimums because of terrain, and the same phi- losophy applies to all types of instrument approaches, so check and be sure.
Once you have decided you can get from here to there in one piece, there is another source you should consult to prevent an awk- ward, perhaps expensive, situation. It is considered the last word in operational information (short of being there, of course) and bears the name NOTAM — governmentese for NOtice To AirMen. Whenever a radio aid goes out of service or airport lighting systems fail or para- chute jumping is in progress (how’d you like to have a group of four parachutists in formation suddenly join you in the cockpit of a Chero- kee?) or any one of a thousand things that could affect the operation of airplanes, it will be published as a NOTAM in the ATC communi- cation system. It would be embarrassing indeed should you take off for Buffalo in the middle of winter with an airplane full of passengers and find out halfway there that snowplows are the only vehicles per- mitted on the runways at Buffalo today. You can avoid this kind of problem by asking the briefer to check the NOTAMs while you’re still in the planning stage.
You should be aware that there are several different types of NOTAMs, and even though you ask, you may not get all the infor- mation you need. The sleeper is the Class II NOTAM, which appears in printed form for mail distribution and which doesn’t show up in the course of a normal scan. When you request NOTAMs during a
Chapter Six
preflight briefing, the specialist looks at the end of the hourly sequence for your destination or refers to the NOTAM summary. Un- fortunately, the Class II NOTAMs don’t show up on the screen, and you’ll never know unless you specifically request, “Are there any Class II NOTAMs in effect ? ”
An accident at a midwestern airport several years ago points up the importance of checking all the NOTAMs. Following an un- eventful flight from Chicago, the light twin commenced an ILS ap- proach and was tracked by radar to the vicinity of the outer marker. Shortly thereafter, the airplane broke out of the low over- cast in a vertical bank, struck several power lines along the main street of a small town, and crashed into a bookstore.
Pilot disorientation? Engine failure? Instrument malfunction? We’ll never know for sure because all aboard were killed, and the airplane was completely destroyed by fire.
But an intriguing report was filed by another pilot who flew the same ILS approach an hour after the accident. He wrote, “I was making an ILS coupled approach when the plane abruptly turned right and assumed a nose-down attitude. The descent rate was 2000 fpm, and the heading changed approximately 130 de- grees. I uncoupled the autopilot and hand-flew the plane to a level attitude, after losing 1000 feet.”
Now the Class II NOTAMs become significant because right there on the ILS approach chart was the following limitation: Au-
topilot Coupled Approach Not Authorized. The same information
was included in the Class II NOTAMs for that airport.
This is the sort of very -nice-to-know information that is pub- lished as a Class II NOTAM. There’s no evidence that the pilot of the twin requested this information or that he noticed the restric- tion on the approach chart. For that matter, there’s no evidence that a glitch in the ILS signal caused the accident. But the FARs require that instrument pilots become familiar with all informa- tion pertinent to a proposed flight. When in doubt, which should be frequently in this business, ask.