RNAV Approach Quiz

From the “you learn something every day” file comes a fascinating Air Safety Foundation quiz on RNAV approaches. For the non-pilots and/or non-instrument rated among us, RNAV is short for “random area navigation” and for the most part refers to satellite navigation — in other words, GPS. It’s not called GPS because there are other area navigation methods such as loran, omega, inertial navigation, and so on. But they all do the same basic thing, which is to allow a pilot to fly from any random point in the world to any other point. Prior to RNAV, radio navigation consisted of flying from one ground-based station to another. A highway in the sky, if you will, but one firmly tied to the ground. These ground-based stations are...

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GPS Approach Hell

A while back, I made a casual suggestion John at Aviation Mentor.  He often writes about instrument flying in “glass panel” aircraft, something that is near and dear to my heart since this is one of my specialties at work. I’d been noticing that more and more instrument approach procedures where being developed with weird minima.   There were columns for LNAV, LNAV/VNAV, RNP, LPV, and more.  Back in the late 90′s when I got my instrument rating, these acronyms weren’t even a gleam in the eye of their creator.  Now they’re all over the place, and CFIIs have to ensure their students know what these things mean. I’ll let John take it from there.  Read his article and tell me it doesn’t sound confusing. ...

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