Ron Garret wrote:
snip



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.

How is this an emergency?


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.

I don't see how with a gps you know where you are and with 2 VORs (for
example) you don't know where you are. Just because they were written
before GPS does not mean they are no longer valid. RNAV was around
long before GPSs.


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.

If you already know the answer and were given instructions by
controllers to do this in the past, why pose it here? Can you get that
information from the controllers in writing?

While your specific example may work for you in this case, applying that
logic in other places will get you killed. If you follow the regs the
way they are written you will be fine and you won't get in trouble. If
you have an emergency (and I don;t think a non-op comms radio qualifies)
then you certainly can do whatever you need to do to make a safe ending
to the flight.


How does going to FUL require what you state? Cannot you pick which
approach and IAF?

Why do you choose the VOR procedure at FUL rather than the LOC/DME? In
that case it is easy to pick the approach with nopt.


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.


So you are saying you don't know what you are supposed to do when you
reach a clearance limit and there is no published hold?

Are you sure direct VNY means KNVY and not eh vor or an iaf? Did the
controllers say "...SNS, direct" or "...SNS, direct KVNY?" there is a
difference I think.

VNY IS an IAF. So is FIM. Why not choose those as IAFs and follow a
published approach rather than your own vectors?

VTU is an NOPT to the LDA.
So is FIM

If you want to use your GPS you can use that for the GPS approaches.
You have your pick of the approaches and the IAFs.

rg