Any Items on a Sectional that are Useless?

I think those are areas where there isn't much else around.
 
Useless items on a sectional? How about dams and lakes that don't exist?
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My house is a "settlement" on the VFR sectional. Heh.

Useless: Private airports that have been overgrown or would kill you if you tried using one in an emergency.

I went out and circled four of them today to take a look, south of my house. One was so "gone" you couldn't find it, one was overgrown with stuff that would flip the airplane, and two were in decent shape.

Another a few miles north of there got terrorized as a simulated engine out target. It was also in good shape.

The three that looked good all had wind socks. Thought that was interesting to note.

I also circled the ADS-B UAT tower. And Foreflight + Stratux said "Low" for signal strength the whole time while circling it. Haha. But had decoded about 100 aircraft positions off of it and weather.
 
I thought that private airports were charted mostly for navigational purposes. I.e., if you see one you can use it as an aid to identify your position. But I've had similar luck picking them out from the air, as in basically none.
 
iamtheari said:
I thought that private airports were charted mostly for navigational purposes. I.e., if you see one you can use it as an aid to identify your position. But I've had similar luck picking them out from the air, as in basically none.
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Well, if the engine quits it's (in theory) a decent place to land. But not so much when they're not really strips anymore and are overgrown and useless.
 
That temple jumps out at you. It looks like the Taj Mahal, complete with gardens on an otherwise undeveloped ridge top.

Some of the abandoned airfields aren't useful. I've never been able to spot the one south of Santa Rosa, and Hamilton Field has been obliterated for wetland restoration, yet it's still charted. It's easier to spot Crissy Field, which isn't charted.
 
tinerj said:
I fly exclusively VFR with nothing for navigation but a compass and a tablet. I wish I could unclutter the Sectional on the tablet so it shows only items needed for a VFR flight.
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That's essentially what I asked in the emails to the FAA. I was hoping they had the actual GIS layers for the various data sets (airports, airspace, roads, lakes, etc) available; I wanted to "declutter" the map and use those visuals for a blog post about airspace classes. They told me the separate data layers aren't available to the public though.
 
Knowing how to pull lat/longs from a chart is useful for glider pilots that land out to tell their crew or the towplane where to find them. I've reported fires also by lat/long.

Victor airways on the sectional tell airobatic pilots where they shouldn't be doing loops or other maneuvers not necessary for normal flight.
 
MAKG1 said:
...I've never been able to spot the one south of Santa Rosa...
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I landed there on one of my student cross-countries a few years before it was closed. It was called Santa Rosa Air Center, which made it sound like a happening place, but it turned out to be kind of a ghost town, with weeds growing up out of the pavement. (I do remember seeing a DC-3/C-47 parked there, however).
 
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Useless items on a sectional - this snippet has three:
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1. Anything that is prefaced with "requested," especially when the fed abuses "National Welfare" to convince you
2. "bldgs" in an area like this. If you've not flown in this area, there are spots of buildings everywhere, and there is nothing special about those specific buildings to make you recognize them from any other buildings in the area.
3. A town that has no airport, and more importantly, no infrastructure or buildings. Anyone seen "Pilar" from the air?

Also - waypoints that don't have a name. What exactly are you supposed to say, "Colorado Springs Tower, BugSmasher, over some waypoint by some towers and a ranch, inbound?"
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There a few around here (Monterey Bay, CA area). The sectional identifies several locations as towns or settlements, but in reality the names were railroad stops in the 1800s, disappearing by the 1920s. From either air or ground, there is nothing there but a straight train track. Useless for navigation. Plus, no one but someone who is pretty up on local history would know what you are talking about should you give it as your location.
 
SkyHog said:
Also - waypoints that don't have a name. What exactly are you supposed to say, "Colorado Springs Tower, BugSmasher, over some waypoint by some towers and a ranch, inbound?"
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That visual checkpoint is named TOWER, but it qualifies as useless for me. One of the first things I learned in my flight training was that towers are a bad choice for visual en route checkpoints, especially towers you don't personally know and short ones like that one. Maybe the non-guyed cell tower near my parents' house is a good one to spot from a reasonably low altitude, but a 300-foot tower of unknown design will probably be nearly invisible from the air.
 
ARFlyer said:
Very few of them knew what those symbols were, much less cared.
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People barely know the symbols on the legend and you want them to know the chart user's guide? :)
 
tinerj said:
I fly exclusively VFR with nothing for navigation but a compass and a tablet. I wish I could unclutter the Sectional on the tablet so it shows only items needed for a VFR flight.
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Use the terrain map? I know a lot of folks do.

To answer the question: Anything I don't care about is useless ;)
 
Van Johnston said:
VFR aircraft can use airways too.
- understand, but what is the operational advantage of doing so?

Ease of navigation. Good practice if you plan on getting your IR in the future.

Plus collision avoidance.
- How so? Do you want the VFR traffic on the airway with you, or off the airway? I would think you would want the airway to yourself.

Different altitudes. Increments of 1000 feet for IFR, increments of 1000 +500 fee for VFR.

Plus 91.303(d).
- ok, if I ever learned that 30yrs ago (when it was 91.71(c)) I quickly forgot it. But this makes sense.

Like why show MTRs when those are for the military?
- because I remember learning to be vigilant regarding MTRs. I don't recall a similar admonition regarding victor airways.

You don't have fast movers in the system flying Victor airways. You might have them on MTRs.
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Another operational advantage of VFR airw - in areas eith very few landamrksthey tend to be the lowest altitude routes
Van Johnston said:
VFR aircraft can use airways too.
- understand, but what is the operational advantage of doing so?
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There are a few. Just off the top of my head...

In sparse areas, they are routes on which you know you can get a good nav signal. In mountainous terrain, they also tend to be over lower terrain. If nothing else, if you are in trouble and out of line of sight for ATC communications, since they are the routes IFR and many VFR aircraft use, you may be in line of sight of aircraft passing overhead and can call for help.

A lot of the advantages have, and continue to, go by the wayside as GPS and direct routing goes by the wayside. But that's one of the reasons o many folks use terrain maps instead (while keeping sectionals available) and Jepp even started on the creation of more GPS-friendly VFR charts with less "stuff."
 
When I was in Australia, we carried WAC charts (or whatever they called them down there at that scale). We made two observations early on. One is the things I thought were small towns on the map were pointed out by our guide as actually just being HOUSES. We also noted there were wells (or as they call them down there, bores). Margy came to the realization that this wasn't for Navigation so much as emergency survival info.

I brought my Garmin 195 along just for kicks. It turned out that it had all the Aussie airports in the database (I had thought I'd have to key in the LatLon for the ones we were going to use from the aussie equiv of the AFD we had). Of course the ground features weren't there, but then again, in most of the area we were flying in, there weren't ground features to see anyhow.
 
denverpilot said:
Useless: Private airports that have been overgrown or would kill you if you tried using one in an emergency.
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Yeah. I've seen some where a charted airport is literally dangerous to choose as an engine out landing spot
 
timwinters said:
airfields titled "objectionable" with no other information.

that's pretty useless...
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Yeah. No info on why it's objectionable. Maybe they should just not be there or labeled as Unsafe if that's the reason they are objectionable
 
luvflyin said:
Yeah. No info on why it's objectionable. Maybe they should just not be there or labeled as Unsafe if that's the reason they are objectionable
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It's only shown for navigational significance. The FAA is not going to expound on why they don't think you should land there. What happens is that when you build an airport, you're required to send notice to the FAA. The FAA turns around and issues a determination on whether they think it's a good idea, but it is purely advisory. They can't tell you NOT to build or use the airport. As a last ditch, they designate you OBJECTIONABLE and most of these don't show up on charts unless they have some useful navigational significance.
 
Most airports don't show up on charts. You'll find unimproved or minimally improved strips just everywhere if you look closely at the terrain. I typically find at least one every time I go out on a CAP search exercise. Those are some 40 square nm at a time.
 
The airport owner had the option of having his strip charted or not.
 
jordane93 said:
Indeed. I teach my students this to have them ballpark diversion distances.
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Or just have a sectional plotter, overlay it on the chart... much faster and easier especially in turbulence.

I do like all the symbology and landmarks. Sometimes I will just fly around aimlessly and try to compare my position on the sectional with the ground, and see if I can spot the town or landmark.
 
denverpilot said:
I also circled the ADS-B UAT tower. And Foreflight + Stratux said "Low" for signal strength the whole time while circling it. Haha. But had decoded about 100 aircraft positions off of it and weather.
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It was LOWer than you the whole time, so what's the problem? :)
 
denverpilot said:
I also circled the ADS-B UAT tower. And Foreflight + Stratux said "Low" for signal strength the whole time while circling it. Haha. But had decoded about 100 aircraft positions off of it and weather.
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The Low stands for the type of tower. Just like the Terminal, Low and High VORs, ADS-B towers have Low, Mid and High Towers.
 
Everskyward said:
Some interesting things here. Sawmills, OK; temple, yes there is one and it's pretty prominent; ranches, hmmm; bldg, really?

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See those little asterik looking marks along the coast? (not those blue dots) THOSE are the most useless symbols on a sectional chart. They are called "rocks awash." I can't recall if they are charted for high tide, low tide, or always present. But you really gonna navigate by 'em?
 
Bobcat1 said:
See those little asterik looking marks along the coast? (not those blue dots) THOSE are the most useless symbols on a sectional chart. They are called "rocks awash." I can't recall if they are charted for high tide, low tide, or always present. But you really gonna navigate by 'em?
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Good to know they are there if you go for an emergency landing in the surf. Of course depending on your altitude, you might not have time to look at the sectional and notice them.
 
Actually, they've since changed the nomeclature on the chart legend in the past 40 years. They left out the "awash" bit. That way they can chart rocks on the Phoenix sectional.
 
I've landed at Hite. Fairly short and narrow but paved. The sightseeing Cessna 207's from MOAB or Grand Canyon sometimes come in there. Its doable but you need to be competent. I mean if a 207 filled to capacity can do it...
 
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