It's always nice when there's a chance to throw some fun into the learning process. Anyone who looks at aviation maps, whether they're a pilot or some day want to be, sees those inexplicably-named 5-letter names for waypoints (also called intersections and fixes) on the map. Sometimes they may actually make some sense. Near here, GILRO intersection located near the city of Gilroy is the entry point for instrument approaches to San Jose International and Reid-Hillview Airports. And SUNOL intersection, located near the town of, you guessed it, Sunol is commonly used for traffic going to San Francisco and Oakland International Airports. So if you're not on an instrument flight plan, it's good to know so you can steer clear of these chokepoints.
More often than not, the names make little sense. They are, after all, just intended as a 5-letter index into a navigation database. For example, at Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose, we have boring and meaningless names on the RNAV/GPS Runway 31R approach - after passing the initial approach fix at GILRO, it goes to ECYON, OZNUM and JOPAN. They really are just intended to enter into a flight computer. And you don't even enter them since you'd just select the whole approach procedure.
But fortunately there are some gems of humor out there too. Yesterday I mentioned a few on Twitter and Facebook, and asked who knows of more of them. I started by mentioning one of the most famous in the aviation community, the "Looney Tunes Approach" at Portsmouth NH (KPSM), which has a series of waypoints ITAWT, ITAWA, PUDYE, TTATT and IDEED. (If you aren't seeing that as a quote of the cartoon character Tweety Bird, read it again.) Someone at the FAA had fun with that. And now all of us can too. The instrument approach procedure (or "approach plate") for that one is the
Portsmouth RNAV/GPS Runway 16 approach.
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But fortunately there are some gems of humor out there too. Yesterday I mentioned a few on Twitter and Facebook, and asked who knows of more of them. I started by mentioning one of the most famous in the aviation community, the "Looney Tunes Approach" at Portsmouth NH (KPSM), which has a series of waypoints ITAWT, ITAWA, PUDYE, TTATT and IDEED. (If you aren't seeing that as a quote of the cartoon character Tweety Bird, read it again.) Someone at the FAA had fun with that. And now all of us can too. The instrument approach procedure (or "approach plate") for that one is the Portsmouth RNAV/GPS Runway 16 approach.
It's officially Summer in the northern hemisphere. On June 21, the first day of Summer, we had thunderstorms here in San Jose and elsewhere in Northern California, some with frequent lightning. We even saw one that had a small funnel cloud. While we usually have some minor thunderstorms in the Bay Area at times from Spring to Fall, these conditions were things we see maybe once every 5-10 years. So that's rare here.
