Photo by Pilatus Aircraft Ltd

I had a great time attending the Pilatus Owners and Pilots Association convention in Boulder not long ago. It was the 15th annual get-together for POPA, and pilots and owners had a chance to tour the Pilatus facility on Rocky Mountain Metro Airport (I still call it Jeffco) where PC-12s are completed for delivery. It was a great party, with Pilatus even sponsoring a night airshow at Metro for the group following a lavish dinner.

PC-12 owners are passionate about their airplanes, with good reason. The big turboprop single is a remarkably versatile combination of cabin room, payload, range and short runway performance. The PC-12 cabin is about the same size as a King Air 200. To help make all that space accessible there is a big cargo door on the left aft side of every airplane. Pilatus likes to show off the space available by loading a big Harley in the aft cabin while preserving comfortable seating and private lav forward. The PC-12 can fly missions other airplanes simply cannot manage.

I was happy to learn in conversations with people at the conference that PC-12 pilots are also very dedicated FltPlan.com users. The huge majority of all pilots of turbine powered business airplanes use FltPlan.com routinely, and the PC-12 pilots at the conference are among the most enthusiastic about the service. FltPlan.com is working very well for them just as it does for all other types of personal and business airplanes.

The many PC-12 pilots I spoke with during the conference all praised the accuracy of a FltPlan.com flight plan for coming very close all of the time in predicting time en route and total fuel burn. Each said that FltPlan.com did a great job of accounting for variables in wind, weather and cruise altitude.

With its single engine the PC-12 is simply more fuel efficient than other airplanes its size. To maximize that inherent efficiency PC-12 pilots want to load on enough fuel for a very conservative reserve, but not tanker along unnecessary weight. And everyone I talked to at the conference said FltPlan.com helped them maximize their already efficient airplanes.

Congratulations to POPA on 15 years of success and to Pilatus for creating such a useful, comfortable and efficient airplane.

ABC television news is at it again with the scare stories about how personal electronic devices can cause dangerous interference with an airplane’s avionics. ABC cites a more or less secret report that supposedly documents dozens of incidents of misbehaving avionics on airline jets that corrected themselves when the cabin attendants hunted down powered up electronic devices and made the passengers turn them off.

The episodes of cell phones or other personal electronics disrupting avionics operation are really anecdotal. Something funny happened with the avionics, a PED was found to be operating, it was turned off and the avionics problem went away. Was there a link between the avionics malfunction and the PED? Who can say. You really haven’t logged many hours if you haven’t experienced weird and unexplained avionics problems that fixed themselves so blaming a PED for an autopilot kicking off, or a localizer signal wagging  back and forth, is a stretch.

Those of us who fly private airplanes use, and our passengers use, PEDs of all sorts all of the time in flight. I have yet to hear from the pilot of a private airplane that any electronic device caused a problem with the ship’s avionics. Why would interference happen in airliners and not business jets, or turboprops, or even piston singles? You would think given the small size of a piston single that whatever energy a PED is radiating would have a much greater effect on avionics than on a large airline jet. But that’s not the case in the scare stories.

The FARs—91.21 (b)(5)—give the pilot in command or the operator specific authority to allow the use of any electronic device during flight if the PIC or operator determines it will not interfere. As the PIC we can use or allow the use of any PED we have determined does not interfere. Airline captains can’t do the same because the FARs say the holder of an operating certificate, if there is one, must make the determination that there is no interference.

What we have here is an unholy alliance between fear mongers who see airplanes and their systems as some delicate and fragile contraption that is on the verge of failure and disaster at all times, and airline management that doesn’t want the passenger annoyance of unbridled cell phone use in the cabin. Being stuck in the tiny coach seat beside some nonstop cell phone gabber for hours could drive even the most gentle person to violence and nobody—particularly the airlines—want air travel to be even more stressful.

So it is essential that the airlines, and aircraft makers—if not the government itself—periodically hint that cell phones really could cause a disaster. It’s a fine line to walk because nobody in the industry wants the public to think that airplanes are so close to crashing all of the time that one cell phone can bring them down. But if the flight attendants are going to get anybody to pay attention to their warnings about PEDs, a constant low level of fear is necessary.

Technical experts at the avionics makers, aircraft makers and at the airlines are stuck with the task of proving PEDs can never cause interference, and that is impossible. All electronic devices emit at least a tiny amount of energy and if there was a chafed antenna wire for the localizer could that energy interfere? Who can say never, so nobody is willing to say that there is absolutely no chance of a problem.

But when your passengers ask about the issue tell them you have tested the airplane using all sorts of PEDs and there is absolutely no problem. You can also feel free to declare that private airplanes have much more advanced avionics than the airlines and—except for only a small part of the fleets—you would be correct.

Most government actions are transparent. It’s not usually hard to figure out what group a new law, or tax break or entitlement is aimed to please. But for the life of me I can’t figure out what the FAA and Department of Transportation motives are for dismantling the blocked aircraft registration request (BARR). As you no doubt know, BARR allowed you to prevent your aircraft movements from being displayed and recorded on open to the public internet sites.

BARR had been functioning for nearly 11 years. BARR was administered by NBAA. All you needed to do was make a request, and the flight information of your airplane would be blocked from the tracking sites on the internet.

However, BARR did not block the identification of any airplane in the system from government agencies such as TSA, Customs, law enforcement or any other need to know organization. BARR simply kept the movements of your airplane private. Without BARR anyone who has internet access anywhere in the world can see where your airplane is flying, and also see a history of where it has been.

Obviously, the FAA needs to know all about our flights in the IFR system to provide air traffic control. The FAA also needs to have a nationwide air traffic tracking system so it can spot potential bottlenecks caused by weather or dense traffic and try to prevent delays. But just because the government needs what is really private and personal information on our movements in the air, that doesn’t mean it should make that information available to anybody and everybody.

The only reason the FAA gives—though it takes hundreds of words to do it—for the change is that there is a new openness in government. And because there has been at least one case under the Freedom of Information Act where a court ordered the FAA to provide the flight tracking records of a blocked N-number, the FAA says all information on every flight should be available all of the time.

Of course, a gumshoe who is really determined to track an airplane’s movements could do it. Nearly all of us receive our clearances over the open frequency of clearance delivery or ground control. You just hang around the airport with a handheld radio and hear a pilo5 calling for clearance to XYZ airport and you know where the airplane is going. Or you could hire people to watch the ramp at airports and report which airplanes came and went.

But that sort of espionage is certainly not sponsored by the government and it would take a real effort to collect meaningful data. But without the BARR, your every flight is instantly available to anybody anywhere in the world for zero effort or cost. And so is a history of your trips. It is not the government’s role to be broadcasting our flight information for all to see.

An analogy to BARR is the automated highway and bridge toll collection system in place in many metropolitan areas. I was always amazed at the detail in my EZPass statement when I lived in the New York area. I could see that I crossed the Harlem River bridge on the Henry Hudson Highway at an exact date and time, and that X minutes later I went through the toll booth on I-95 in Larchmont. Others may find that information interesting and useful, but it is kept private. In fact, EZPass has been pretty successful in defending its user’s privacy when divorce lawyers, for example, sought proof of the movements of their client’s spouse. And that’s as it should be. EZPass needs the data, but it does not give it to others, much less broadcast it on the internet as the FAA does with our flight information.

So why was the FAA so determined, in the face of many objections from aircraft owners and business groups, to eliminate BARR except for those airplane owners who can prove extreme safety and security risks? I can’t figure it out. The government had, and continues to have, all of the data, so why broadcast it to the world?

Whatever the FAA motives for eliminating BARR our only hope of having it reinstated is with Congress. The FAA still doesn’t have more than a very short term funding authorization so a long term bill is grinding its way through Congress. It was Congress that directed the FAA to form the BARR in the first place, and it looks like Congress is the only hope to get it back, especially since there is no apparent benefit to anybody for eliminating BARR, except maybe for the paparazzi and other voyeurs.

There is a shot at keeping your N-number blocked by submitting a written description of your valid security concern regarding the security of owners, operators or passengers in an aircraft. You can also claim a business related security concern. You must send your written certification describing your security concern to the FAA by July 5, and then update the statement annually after that. Email your certification of security concern to the FAA at CertifiedSecurityConcern@faa.gov. Hope it works.

French authorities have released details from the flight data and cockpit voice recorders of the final few minutes of the Air France flight 447 Airbus A330 that crashed into the Atlantic almost two years ago. To me the whole sequence of events is terrifying.

Probably because of pitot tube icing, or for whatever other reason, the airspeed information supplied by the multiple air data computers went crazy. The A330 is a fly-by-wire (FW) airplane and to operate normally the computers that actually manipulate the flight control surfaces need valid and reliable airspeed data. As soon as the FBW computers identified a fault in the airspeed input they kicked off the autopilot and autothrottle and reverted to a “direct law” operation.

So, without warning, the crew lost the autopilot, but also lost the envelope protection that is part of the FBW system. Instantly the crew went from observing an airplane flying itself–and one which they could not stall even if they tried because the FBW computers would not pitch the A330 to a stalling angle of attack–to hand flying at 35,000 feet, in the dark, in an area of thunderstorms.

I wonder, could I handle that situation? The answer is I believe that I could, maybe, though none of us hand flies at FL 350 anymore because RVSM procedures insist that the autopilot fly to maintain the required altitude keeping precision. But in years past we would all hand fly in the high flight levels, at least occasionally. I was once part of a crew that ferried a new Falcon 50 from France to the U.S. hand flying the whole way because in those days the avionics—including the jet style attitude indicator and autopilot—were installed during completion in Little Rock. It was work to hold altitude and course, and we took turns, but it certainly didn’t seem risky.

But the Air France crew faced a very different situation. They were seeing erratic airspeed indications even though the attitude display on the PFD was almost certainly performing normally. There would have been a huge number of CAS messages to try to understand and deal with. And the FDR recorded at least a couple of stall warnings.

The stall warnings were apparently valid as the recordings showed the airplane entering a deep stall from which it never recovered. For some reason the crew never lowered the nose though the airplane flight controls and engines were apparently responding correctly to control inputs.

Even if the pilots had practiced a similar scenario in simulator training, it wouldn’t be the same. In the sim we are all cocked and loaded for the worst. In fact, if you fly more than a couple minutes in the sim with no CAS messages or warning lights, you really get worried because you know the instructor has concocted something really bad to throw at you. But in the real world we can’t always be on high alert because, unlike the simulator, problems are so infrequent, and almost always very minor if they do occur. Most pilots will fly their entire career without facing an emergency remotely like that handed to the Air France crew.

This accident exposes the safety dilemma of cockpit automation. It is clear that the advanced and automated jet cockpit is safer than earlier generation airplanes. The U.S. major airlines have not had a fatal accident since the fall 2001. There have been a couple fatal regional airline accidents during that period, but the recent safety record is so good for airline and business jet flying that there is nothing to compare it to from the past. Overall, cockpit automation has improved safety, efficiency and passenger comfort.

But the problem is that the human pilot is the final safety net when automation fails. For example, the pilots of an A330 cannot stall the airplane, exceed airspeed limits, or really even lose control because the FBW computers prevent it even if there are some system failures. If one pitot system had failed that would have still been the case. But when all airspeed data became unreliable the humans were handed the problem of controlling the airplane without warning and with all sorts of confusing information on the flat screens in front of them.

Remember your early IFR flying days when we all practiced “partial panel” flying? The big worry was attitude and directional gyro failure because light airplanes used not very reliable vacuum pumps to power the gyros. The standard drill after a vacuum pump or gyro failure was to cover the gyros so that you could concentrate on the “reliable” information from the airspeed, altimeter, vertical speed and rate of turn gyro. It helped to not see that misleading information from the most important instrument, the artificial horizon.

Many, many pilots didn’t make if down safely after loss of the gyros in light airplanes. It became clear that “partial panel” just wasn’t a reasonable solution to back up a vacuum pump. Airplane manufacturers and airplane owners found ways to add redundancy so that the loss of all attitude information even in light airplanes is now very unlikely.

I think it is the same situation with an automated cockpit. If the worse happens and the multiple layers of automation all fail, I don’t think it is reasonable to just hand the problem back to the humans. The Air France crew didn’t succeed and I don’t want to bet my life that I could do it either. We need a better solution that just tossing the grenade to the pilots when the fundamental airplane systems suddenly stop working.

The mission was to fly my Baron from home base Muskegon (MKG) in western Michigan down to Batavia, Ohio, to attend Sporty’s Pilot Shop 50th anniversary celebration and fly-in. Clermont County Airport, home of Sporty’s in Batavia, is nestled right up against the eastern edge of the Cincinnati Class B airspace.

For years flying around Cincinnati has been a pain in the butt. Delta had made CVG one of its main hubs and when there was a traffic push, the controllers had a hard time keeping up. If you wanted to land at one of the general aviation airports around CVG it could get complicated, and so could just flying past Cincinnati airspace en route.

To help pilots and controllers make sense of operations around Cincinnati the FAA created two “T” airways, T217 on the east and T213 on the west. The “T” stands for terminal. Unlike a Victor airway, you need some sort of RNAV system to fly the T routes because the legs of the T airways are not all defined by a VOR radial. The maximum authorized altitude for the T airways is 8,000 feet.

I had never flown the T airways, and I don’t know if they exist in any other terminal area in the country. But since the FAA went to the trouble to work with controllers and pilots to create the routes, I thought why not give them a try.

T217 begins at the Bonee intersection northeast of Dayton and I could fly it to the Heden intersection which would take me very close to the Clermont County Airport. Seems like that is exactly how the T airways was intended to be used.

T217 was, of course, in FltPlan.com and the routing came up in the flight plan as normal. When I checked FltPlan.com before heading for the airport I saw that ATC has issued me a clearance just as I had filed, including T217. And when I called for the clearance, it came back “as filed.” I was being a good boy and using the system.

But, you guessed it. As we were nearing the Bonee intersection to begin flying T217 the Dayton controller cleared us directly to Clermont County.

It turns out that Delta has pulled its hub operations out of CVG and traffic is down as much at 70 percent from the peak of 5 to 10 years ago. Cincinnati controllers have gone from being overwhelmed during traffic pushes to having plenty of time to handle all of the traffic flying into or out of surrounding airports. The T airways are the solution to a traffic congestion problem that no longer exists.

The Sporty’s 50th anniversary celebration fly-in was a huge success with more than 200 airplanes stopping by and more than 1,000 people on hand during various times of the day. Sporty’s served up over 1,200 free hot dogs and 800 pieces of 50th birthday cake. Traffic at the big airport is down, but Sporty’s still draws a crowd to Clermont County. You can stop by for a hot dog on any Saturday, and try to fly the T airways, but you’ll probably just be cleared direct.

There is a growing concern about government spending and that is probably a good thing. Except when it comes to aviation.

Most big government opponents say that it is government that is getting in the way of business growth. That may be true. But the reality is just the opposite when it comes to aviation. Not enough government resources going to the FAA are actually slowing growth and development of the aviation industry.

Congress appears to be taking a meat cleaver approach to federal government spending, and maybe that is the only possible way to cut because every program is the favorite of some group or the other. But the proposed budget cuts for the FAA will not only set back new programs such as the transition to satellite-based NextGen ATC system, it will also potentially stifle every other aspect of aviation growth.

When the FAA budget gets cut, so does the size of its staff, and that includes the inspectors who certify new aviation activity. There is already a backlog of programs and projects awaiting certification review, and with the proposed FAA budget cut back to the 2008 level, that list will only grow longer.

The obvious issues are new airplane development where FAA inspectors must spend hundreds, if not thousands of hours, reviewing test data, and doing actual flight testing. Every company from Boeing to Piper will see their airplane certification programs—already far too long—stretch out even longer if the proposed budget and staff cuts are enacted.

New airplanes get the most attention when it comes to certification, but almost every other aviation activity also requires some level of FAA input and approval. Think of the charter operator who wants to add airplanes to his certificate? That takes time from an inspector who may not be there. An airplane owner wants to update his avionics. The avionics hardware is approved, but the installation and combination with other equipment will probably require the time of an FAA inspector. Even the avionics shop itself, or a maintenance shop, requires routine inspection and approval from the FAA.

While Congress plans to trim FAA spending, it also makes demands for higher levels of inspection, or more training and checking requirements for pilots and operators. The public—read voters—will not stand for a reduction in government supervision of aviation, so when funding for that supervision is cut, it is the aviation industry that suffers.

I don’t have any ideas on how to resolve this dilemma. When it comes to raising taxes we all want it to be on somebody else. And when cuts are made, don’t touch our livelihood. But by not providing the resources the FAA needs the Congress is actually working against its stated goal of creating jobs and growing the economy. Aviation can’t grow unless the FAA is big enough to keep up.

The FAA is beating the drum urging all of us to equip our airplanes now with the ADS-B (automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast) equipment that is the backbone of the NextGen air traffic control system. In short, ADS-B continuously broadcasts to all other airplanes, and to FAA controllers, the location, altitude and velocity of each aircraft.

Instead of a radar on the ground detecting the location of each aircraft, ADS-B will broadcast to all the aircraft’s position, altitude and so on. With the position fixing based on the common navigation grid of GPS, and with a new position broadcast once each second, ADS-B will provide a much more accurate and reliable location and flight track of each aircraft than ground based radar can.

But switching to ADS-B transfers many of the costs of equipping the ATC system from the ground to the cockpit. With ADS-B the FAA will no longer have to build and operate expensive radars, but airplane owners will have to pay to install and maintain ADS-B equipment. As you can imagine, many of us are not anxious to pay for something—air traffic service—that has been government funded for decades. Yes, we all own and maintain transponders to communicate with the radar, but a transponder is a minor expense compared to a full-up ADS-B installation.

To try to make ADS-B and NextGen more attractive to airplane owners the FAA offers to send up weather information and a plot of all other aircraft in your area for free over the ADS-B data link. Most of us already have a traffic alerting system, and in larger or turbine airplanes, a traffic system is required. And most of us also have the equipment to receive weather via satellite either from XM or Sirius. So, the best the FAA can offer is free weather instead of paying the satellite subscription, and a more accurate display of traffic than an airborne system can provide. That’s not much.

But the FAA’s selling of ADS-B as a source for weather and traffic is even more disingenuous than it appears. The reason is that ADS-B is designed to operate on two different frequencies and only one of those frequencies can receive free traffic and weather.

The system that gets the free stuff is called the universal access transceiver (UAT) and it operates on 978 MHz. This is the network that you have read about that is in use now in Alaska, over the Gulf of Mexico, by UPS cargo airplanes, and by several major flight schools. The UAT has enough bandwidth for the weather, traffic, notams and such to be sent up, along with the transmitter in the airplane broadcasting the aircraft position information.

The other ADS-B frequency is 1090 MHZ, the frequency used by all transponders, including the Mode-S units that are part of TCAS equipment. The 1090 frequency is very crowded, as you can imagine, with every transponder and ground based radar broadcasting on that frequency, as well as TCAS units exchanging information. There is no room left on 1090 to send any additional information. And some of us even wonder if there is enough bandwidth on 1090 for the addition of ADS-B, plus the transponders that we all must continue to have operating after ADS-B becomes law in 2020.

So, if you choose 1090 for your ADS-B solution, you won’t get any of the free information the FAA touts. And here is the real poke in the eye—any airplane that operates above 18,000 feet must use 1090. So all turbine airplanes and even pressurized or turbocharged pistons must use 1090 and thus will not get any of the free services the FAA talks about.

It’s something of a bait and switch by the FAA. The agency doesn’t always make it clear when selling the benefits of ADS-B that many airplanes cannot use those benefits.

The real ADS-B benefits for higher performance airplanes may be closer spacing between aircraft allowed by the greater precision of ADS-B compared to radar. Closer spacing may reduce delays and we all benefit from time and fuel savings.

But the requirement for all airplanes in the system to have ADS-B isn’t until January 1, 2020 so spacing reductions cannot happen until after that date. And even then, it will undoubtedly take years for us to notice reduced delays and smoother traffic flow.

ADS-B is a better solution to locating and separating air traffic than ground based radar. That is it’s only real benefit. It will cost airplane owners a bundle to equip with ADS-B, and that’s a fact. Will we see a reduction in delays? Who knows? But I wish the FAA would be more upfront and honest and just say that ADS-B is better, but it shifts cost from the government to the airplane owner. ADS-B is like any tax increase. We hope to get something for it, but for now we can’t be sure. The “free” stuff the FAA is selling just isn’t available to many airplane owners.

I continue to be amazed by the flight time and fuel burn accuracy of a FltPlan.com flight plan. Even on trips of several hours I usually see the FltPlan.com numbers to be within five minutes of the plan.

The one issue FltPlan.com cannot account for are the vectored departure or arrival procedures that are still common at many busy airports. These procedures specify a turn to some heading, climb to a certain altitude, and then be ready for whatever fix the controller sends you to. It’s impossible for the computers at FltPlan.com to guess how far you will fly on the vector before being cleared to a fix along the planned route.

Now a study done by General Electric has found that replacing the vectored area type of procedures with specific routes using required navigation performance (RNP) navigation could save almost 13 million gallons of jet fuel a year. And that would result from establishing the RNP procedures at just 46 midsized airports.

None of this is new. The FAA and airplane and avionics makers have been demonstrating time and fuel savings using specific curved routes for decades. Those of you who have been around for a while will remember all the hoopla of the microwave landing system (MLS) in the 1970s. MLS allowed pilots to fly very precise curved terminal area procedures in the days before GPS. Now with GPS and FMS computers, nearly all of us fly with the necessary navigation precision to be guided over any terminal routing the FAA can create.

But what I don’t like is calling these new terminal procedures “highways in the sky” or HITS. This has been a NASA dream for decades and countless display formats have been created to guide a pilot along the HITS path. The most common display format and the one that has made it into several glass cockpits now certified is the suspended boxes that you are supposed to fly through thus achieving both lateral and vertical path guidance.

I hate the HITS boxes. Trying to keep the little airplane symbol in the middle of the boxes as they zoom by on the PFD display is very unnatural to me. And even though I have been able to fly many versions of the display I still can’t get over the urge to duck, or react in some other way as the boxes go flying by.

The alternative to the HITS boxes was actually developed in the 1960s by Collins Radio. It’s the V-bar flight director first introduced on the FD-108. The beauty of the V-bar is that it naturally combines the lateral and vertical guidance in exactly the way you need to maneuver the airplane to stay on course.

The first flight directors used a cross-pointer display with a vertical bar moving left or right to command a turn, and a horizontal bar moving up and down to command pitch. The pitch bar makes sense, but airplanes need to bank to turn, but on the cross-pointer the needle stays vertical with no indication of necessary bank angle.

The V-bar banks and pitches so it is instantly natural to fly the little airplane into the apex of the command bars. Flying a curved procedure that is necessary for precise terminal guidance following a V-bar is as natural as flying the straight in ILS. No new techniques or training are necessary.

When the FAA was at the height of its promotion of MLS in the 1970s it configured a Boeing 737 with a cockpit located in the center of the cabin. Pilots, like me, who had no experience flying MLS would get put into that test cockpit to see how well we could fly curved approach procedures. When the V-bar was used to command the procedure, we all did great, staying within a few feet of the desired course both laterally and vertically. No other command display system worked nearly as well.

The V-bar flight director was a miracle of electro-mechanical precision and performance when Collins engineers figured out how to make it nearly 50 years ago. Now the V-bar is just one more symbol on the flat glass PFD, but it is still the best, most natural, and precise way to guide a pilot along a highway in the sky. Toss the flying boxes, and keep the V-bar forever.

It’s amazing how many pilots simply file direct, even for very long distance flights. Yes, we all have the equipment to fly direct, and in many parts of the country a direct clearance will come through. But filing direct for long distance flight often shuffles some of our pilot duties onto others.

The problem with long direct routing is that the FAA’s air traffic “host” computer system isn’t as smart as many of us think it is. The software for the controllers’ computer network is being upgraded, but the system is still more local than national.

All IFR clearances originate in the en route center where the departure airport is located. The computer in each center knows the location and all specifics of every fix and airport in that center’s airspace. The computer is also up to speed on the fixes and airports in neighboring center airspace. But beyond its neighbors, a center’s computer only knows a few highlights in terms of airports and fixes.

When you file direct to an airport that is beyond the boundaries of the air traffic control center where you are departing, the originating center may not know the location of the airport you filed to. That is particularly likely if the destination is more than one center’s airspace away.

In some cases a controller will have to make manual entries to get the system to accept a “direct” routing over a long distance. Sometimes the people at FltPlan.com have to add a Lat./Lon. fix to get the computer to accept your plan. Well, you may think, that’s their job. But it really isn’t. As pilots it’s really our job to put some effort into flight planning.

Even if you intend or hope to file direct it is best to file over a VOR every few hundred miles. The locations of VORs, particularly the high altitude ones, are almost certainly in the computer data base. If you file to cross at least one VOR in each center’s airspace the computers and controllers will know exactly where you are going.

Another issue is that more and more terminal areas have established arrival gates over which all inbound flights must pass. That’s been true for the big cities for years, but now even medium size cities such as Wichita have arrival gates. If you don’t file to cross the gate you may start with a direct clearance, but it will be amended to cross the gate as you approach the area. Making a sharp turn late in the flight to cross the gate can actually add more miles to the trip than filing to fly over the gate originally.

FltPlan.com makes filing an appropriate route so easy because it shows you the routes other pilots have filed, and routes ATC has issued. When you see that most routes cross the same fix for arrival, you can be pretty sure that is what ATC wants and what you will actually fly.

Flying direct is great as long as ATC can handle the routing, and you don’t get a big routing change along the way. But if we make the controller’s job easier we are very likely to make our life better, too.

Being a professional pilot, or flying like one, is really about CYA. Pro pilots follow the procedure—always—and if something goes wrong, the procedure takes the blame, not the pilot.

One of the hallmarks of any professional pilot is that the nose wheel is always on the centerline. When you taxi, you stay on the line. When you takeoff and land, you stay on the line. Being in the middle of the pavement is the safest place to be both for your airplane and your career.

I thought about that when the images of the Air France giant A380 Airbus wing hit the tail of an RJ at Kennedy. I’m sure the Air France crew at least felt a small jolt, but in the video that is everywhere the huge Airbus didn’t even seem to flinch as it spun the RJ around.

It is far too early to know what caused this accident, but for the sake of the Airbus crew, I hope their nose wheel was on the yellow line.

If you are following your taxi route clearance correctly, and your nose wheel is tracking the yellow line, and a little RJ gets in the way far from your view, it’s not your fault. I don’t know who is to blame for this collision, but my bet is that the Air France crew was following their clearance and it is somebody else’s fault.

So, when the nose wheel goes banging along the center line lights you are doing the right thing. Maybe we should call it the CYA line instead of the center line. It’s where pro pilots always go.