In article ,
Tim wrote:

Ron Garret wrote:
In article ,
Tim wrote:


If you don't know you shouldn;t be filing IFR. Period. You can get
someone (including yourself killed.)

...

I know the answer.


Then what is it? And please note that the question is not what do you
do by the book. The question is what do you do in the real world.

(Actually it turns out that there are some interesting subtleties
involved in figuring out what to do in this case even by the book.)


Spoon feeding pilots who are dangerous and ignorant is a sure way to
disaster.


I would think that allowing ignorant pilots to remain ignorant would be
a much surer route to disaster.

For the record, the weather was VFR the whole way (and I knew it) so I
was a good deal more casual about it than I would have been if it had
been IMC the whole way. (I also strongly suspect that if it had been
IMC the whole way I would not have received a direct clearance. I've
flown that route a zillion times and it's never happened before.)

rg

I am not sure how to answer this if you don't want to believe that you
are expected to do what it says in part 91. If you want to make up your
own stuff or do things other people do in the "real world" then go ahead.

First, the regs explicitly sanction "making up your own stuff" (as you
put it) in emergency situations, which lost comm in IMC can easily give
rise to.

Second, a lot of the regs were written before the advent of moving-map
GPS. Many procedures that make sense if you're navigating on a VOR make
less sense if you always know at a glance exactly where you are.

Third, going by the book makes you do some overtly stupid things. The
classic example is going NORDO while flying from AVX to FUL. Going by
the book requires you to fly to SLI, reverse course, return to the exact
spot you just came from (which is over water BTW), and reverse course
again. This procedure is manifestly more dangerous than just flying the
approach straight in (because it involves more maneuvering, more time in
the air, more time over water). Moreover, under normal conditions the
approach is ALWAYS flown straight in (via vectors) and under NORDO
conditions the controllers expect you to fly the approach straight in (I
know because I asked them) notwithstanding that this technically
violates the regs.

And fourth, the regs leave a lot of stuff unspecified. If you go by the
regs in the current situation, you end up over KVNY at 11,000 feet, at
which point you're supposed to initiate your descent. But there's no
published hold at KVNY (to say nothing of the fact that KVNY is not an
IAF for any approach to KVNY) so you have no choice but to improvise at
that point.

rg