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Instrument rated pilots... It's a new 56-day cycle today on FAA published instrument procedures.  I have the list of new procedures here at PilotQuest.Com being automatically updated weekly for California and the entire US.

In California, the big winner today is Auburn Municipal Airport, with a brand new RNAV GPS approach with WAAS and LPV.  The old " GPS RWY 07" has been superseded by "RNAV (GPS) RWY 07" (link to PDF of procedure).
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The response to the list of "New instrument approaches planned for California" last month was encouraging. It looks like pilots found it as useful as I hoped it would be.  I made some updates to the software to update the list on a weekly basis.  And now it's expanded from a statewide list to nationwide.

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Following a related discussion on the Silicon Valley General Aviation mail list, I made a list of the FAA's plans for upcoming new instrument approaches in California.  This list is from the FAA's National Aeronautical Charting Office (NACO).  It's info anyone can get - but hopefully the formatting makes it more easily accessible.

This should mainly be of interest to instrument-rated pilots who fly in California, and pilots who are or plan to get training for their instrument rating in California.

Now that I have software to generate this list from their plans, I'll update it regularly.

Here are some highlights from their current plans...

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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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The Summer flying season is here again.  As more light aircraft are getting increasingly sophisticated panel-mounted GPS systems, pilots are freer to navigate away from airways and radio navigational aids.  One of the most obvious things to try is to just fly a straight line to the destination.  It's called "GPS direct".  But I'll show some local examples from here in Northern California why that isn't always a good idea.  A GPS is still an enormously useful navigation tool.  But it requires delving deeper into how that GPS gadget works to get the best use of it.
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