Decomissioned VORs - why are they still on the charts?

denverpilot said:
A number of them mentioned in the thread are not, no.
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Okay than that's a problem. Thought they were all notated with the x emblem or whatever it is.
If they are advertising live VORs that have been decommissioned, that is indeed a problem.
 
Kritchlow said:
Okay than that's a problem. Thought they were all notated with the x emblem or whatever it is.
If they are advertising live VORs that have been decommissioned, that is indeed a problem.
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That's not what's happening here. A VOR that had been decommissioned two years ago still appears on charts but an active NOTAM states that it's been decommissioned.
 
Which in the modern era is ridiculous. People pay big money to update their electronic versions of the data that FAA is ultimately responsible for on the FAA's cycle. It could at least be accurate. In other electronic updates, changes are measured in days, not years. Even FAA is mandating gadgetry that updates weather that's about ten minutes old, in the cockpit -- as venerable and broken as that new system is. (Heck, if they had any foresight that system could have handled the navaid updates and marking them out of service in near real time also with a repetitive broadcast, too.) It's 2017. Not 1990. We aren't all dialing up our modems to NetZero to get chart data.
 
denverpilot said:
Which in the modern era is ridiculous. People pay big money to update their electronic versions of the data that FAA is ultimately responsible for on the FAA's cycle. It could at least be accurate. In other electronic updates, changes are measured in days, not years. Even FAA is mandating gadgetry that updates weather that's about ten minutes old, in the cockpit -- as venerable and broken as that new system is. (Heck, if they had any foresight that system could have handled the navaid updates and marking them out of service in near real time also with a repetitive broadcast, too.) It's 2017. Not 1990. We aren't all dialing up our modems to NetZero to get chart data.
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But what do you feel is unsafe in having NAVAIDs depicted on charts that have been NOTAMed as decommissioned?
 
I have another potentially unrelated question.

I've heard a couple times in this thread of 'some radials not working' or 'become useless' on VORs. It was always my understanding that VORs propagate signals in all directions, that all radials work or none do. Can VORs have blind spots? What is being talked about here?
 
David Groat said:
I have another potentially unrelated question.

I've heard a couple times in this thread of 'some radials not working' or 'become useless' on VORs. It was always my understanding that VORs propagate signals in all directions, that all radials work or none do. Can VORs have blind spots? What is being talked about here?
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Yes, VORs can have blind spots. Check the entry for the airport or NAVAID in the Chart Supplement under radio aids to navigation. Any restrictions in the standard service volume will be shown there.
 
roncachamp said:
But what do you feel is unsafe in having NAVAIDs depicted on charts that have been NOTAMed as decommissioned?
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It's easy to miss a NOTAM in a pile of FDC NOTAMs. It's not so easy to miss something that was properly removed from a chart.

I'm not excusing pilot who miss them, but it's definitely a safety issue when you tune and identify and something isn't there, and the people who know it's not there haven't removed it from official charts for two years.

We have systems in all other vehicles that update not only in real time for traffic, but also for road closures. FAA is stuck somewhere back in the 90s, when it comes to real time data. Sometimes for good reason, but not in this case. This is simply bureaucracy that can't get out of its own way.

And before you think I'm not a fan of the Airway *system* for flight planning and routing, recall that I'm one of a few people here who's lamented the stamping of every damn approach plate with "Radar required" for many years. The system had built in backups to backups, and navigation via electronic means in aircraft was once state of the art.

Nowadays, it's so far behind even free tools like Waze on a smart phone, it's comical. Why download 16 GB of official data every chart cycle into a device if the people creating the data can't be bothered to work at chart cycle speed?

When was the last time you flew something /U on a long cross country flight and tuned and identified a VOR, out of curiosity? Because I've been doing it for a quarter century and the current state of VOR nav is sketchy. The system that supported it has been slowly eroding.

Which, is why I'll be going /G in December. The ops folks can set the VOR stations on fire or make them into museums soon, either one. I don't care.

The magic $10,000 GPS with a $3 GPS receiver chipset in it can lead me around by the nose, no ops people with Government Motors Suburbans will have to be troubled to drive to a funny looking white building and actually fix things anymore.

They can use them to haul all the pieces to the dump. Or just leave them all parked at the local radar site, which is where they sit, not doing anything, most days. Nice looking trucks. Newer than anything I own. Should be low mileage when they're auctioned off.
 
denverpilot said:
It's easy to miss a NOTAM in a pile of FDC NOTAMs. It's not so easy to miss something that was properly removed from a chart.
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Missing a NOTAM of a decommissioned VOR may be inconvenient but it is not a safety issue. It should not be removed from the charts if it is part of the airway structure, it should be noted that it is not in service.

I'm not excusing pilot who miss them, but it's definitely a safety issue when you tune and identify and something isn't there, and the people who know it's not there haven't removed it from official charts for two years.
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I've twice asked you why you feel it's a safety issue but you've declined to say. If you could have imagined a safety issue you would have stated it.

And before you think I'm not a fan of the Airway *system* for flight planning and routing, recall that I'm one of a few people here who's lamented the stamping of every damn approach plate with "Radar required" for many years. The system had built in backups to backups, and navigation via electronic means in aircraft was once state of the art.
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The approach plate for every damn approach that requires radar should be stamped "radar required", not every approach requires radar.

When was the last time you flew something /U on a long cross country flight and tuned and identified a VOR, out of curiosity? Because I've been doing it for a quarter century and the current state of VOR nav is sketchy. The system that supported it has been slowly eroding.
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Probably more than a quarter century ago.
 
roncachamp said:
I've twice asked you why you feel it's a safety issue but you've declined to say. If you could have imagined a safety issue you would have stated it.
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Just now I re-traced the flight that started all this on SkyVector (it was a 45 minute VFR flight), and when I hit the Brief button I got a data dump that, when I pasted it into MS Word, was 76 pages long. I'm sure the Pontiac VOR inop info was in there somewhere, but it was buried under an avalanche of goverment-ese data. Who's going to read all of that for a 45 min VFR flight?

To fail to update the primary source of information for pilots (the charts) with pertinent info that is coming up on 3 years old, and then simply point fingers at the pilot that misses it with 'you're supposed to know this!' is helping nobody, least of all a fairly new pilot that is just trying to figure all this out.
 
roncachamp said:
Probably more than a quarter century ago.
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Well that pretty much covers why you wouldn't have noticed that flying the "Airway system" in the modern era is a cluster**** compared to back then. I've seen both and seen it degrade. It's not much of an actual system anymore as it is a potholed highway that isn't going to be fixed.

It's bad enough trying to figure out which approaches can even be a safe alternate if the Comm radio craps out, without stuff going OTS and staying that way via NOTAM for years. The "system" used to be able to get you into any Denver airport via published enroute to approach transition routes if your Comm radios crapped the bed. Not so much anymore.

Considering that traffic hasn't grown significantly since the 90s to any of those airports, it's just caused by crumbling infrastructure and planned obsolescence of anything that doesn't have a $10,000 GPS receiver on board. If everything is just a waypoint now, then just chart them as waypoints and stop pretending the VOR is coming back after a G-truck magically leaves the radar site and actually goes somewhere and fixes something.

Hell, you didn't even have to page through the twenty pages of useless FDC NOTAMs about terrorism and stadiums to find actual nav outages.

I got "tune and identify" down pat 26 years ago. The kids now have "auto ID" when they have to flip the Garmin out of satnav mode.

I remember all those safety meetings put on by the FSDO where they told us we'd have "Free Flight" someday and we all chuckled, since they'd just installed two new VORs in the area that year for the spin up of the new DEN.

But we ended up getting it through navaid attrition, after all. Come fly it sometime. It isn't the "system" you remember. The system is being dismantled by letting stuff fail... and leaving the navaids on the charts.

Probably sounds better that way on reports to Congess. "We manage X number of navaids..." as in we "manage" to not repair them and pretend on charts that they will one day be repaired.

Add in that the flight check standards tightened up since then and a wobbly VOR needle isn't good enough anymore, so entire swaths of radials are marked unusable even though we used them just fine when we knew how to back up their wobbly signals at the edges of service areas with a compass and a watch, and ... it ain't much of an "Airway system" anymore. Not down low, anyway.

I'm sure the remaining "critical" VORs will continue to work fine in the flight levels for the airlines until they buy new aircraft with GPS receivers feeding the FMS. Then FAA will stop repairing those ones, too.

It'll be fun to marvel at the tube radios in their dusty dark racks at a VOR site with a nice National Park ranger answering questions about the history of them, sometime well before I'm dead.

It's a "brace new world" out there. We have the much touted "Free Flight" and soon they'll claim the first (neverendng) phases of "NexGen" are completed.

Of course there's still major coverage holes in the WSR-88 Doppler radar network and they haven't manufactured those since 1997. FAA will happily send that data up to your cockpit, complete with coverage holes and only on a secondary basis to traffic, in a resolution that rivals a dial up modem to AOL in 1995 and tout it as amazing new tech

LOL.

It's important to know the limitations of any system. Knowing that bureaucracy and neglect are the major limitations behind the "Airway system" today, is just common sense at this point. When the chart lies to you and tells you a navaid is there, us old folks know those navaids are dying. The younger crowd thinks the chart data is at least as good as their $75 Garmin in their car. And even that is outdated. They're more used to the real time data on their smartphone.

It is 2017 after all. Not 1991. Smartphone ads are even asking if smartphones are becoming "boring". We've had them for a decade now. And I flew with a touchscreen laptop and GPS receiver hooked to that for years before tablets. Always diligently downloading any new "official" nav data before planning any flight, knowing it was always out of date before it even hit my device.

FAA hasn't ever been real good at tech. When I worked as a sub-contractor for them, they wanted our oldest product. And the engineer who worked for the main contractor proudly took me next door from his lab we were working in to show me the tech hotness of the mainframe that ran DUAT in the early 90s. When I went to the FSDO to do some "paperwork" a few months ago the inspector and staff were great. The PC and its badge reader to log the poor guy in added at least thirty minutes of troubleshooting to the process.

We're talking it was so bad my bosses would have made me throw the entire authentication system in the garbage can because it would be costing us business killing levels of money and time. And then the PC "couldn't find the printer". And nice folks were telling the poor inspector who pulled front desk duty that day, that "IT just fixed that computer... is it still not working?"

ROFLMAO. I helped the guy figure out what had happened to the printer mapping. If I didn't, I might still be standing at that desk, waiting.

I know FAA will never catch up on tech. Doesn't bother me.

But I also can see where certain aspects of that tech deficit they have creates safety issues. Charts that aren't updated is clearly in the "critical for flight safety" category.

It'd take them half an hour to log in to their desktop PCs to even request a truck go fix a VOR, judging by what I saw at the front desk here locally. Poor guy. A typewriter and someone who knew how to type, truly would have been faster.

(Don't get me started on typing skill. Giving an inspector who only has "hunt and peck" typing skills a computer and a keyboard is obviously a business disaster, but so common still, it's not even a pet peeve of mine anymore. Any company could probably up their staff productivity by mandating a week of typing classes and a mandatory minimum typing speed, tested. We've got standards for minimum skill-set to fly the plane, might as well have minimum standards for operating a keyboard...)
 
denverpilot said:
Well that pretty much covers why you wouldn't have noticed that flying the "Airway system" in the modern era is a cluster**** compared to back then. I've seen both and seen it degrade. It's not much of an actual system anymore as it is a potholed highway that isn't going to be fixed.
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No, not tuning to an off-route VOR and identifying it solely out of curiosity says nothing like that.
 
roncachamp said:
No, not tuning to an off-route VOR and identifying it solely out of curiosity says nothing like that.
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I have no idea what that sentence even means. Are you advocating not tuning VORs out of curiosity or what? You haven't tuned a VOR enroute in 25 years by your own admission above, so what are you babbling about?

Go have another cup of coffee and enjoy retirement. We got this. It'll only cost me $10,000 to use the "Airway system" as it stands today, starting this December. We'll toss in another $5000 to get our "hockey puck" of safety traffic data too. With labor, I'll have paid $20,000 bucks to upgrade my gear to keep up with FAA's 1990s dream system. LOL.
 
denverpilot said:
I have no idea what that sentence even means. Are you advocating not tuning VORs out of curiosity or what? You haven't tuned a VOR enroute in 25 years by your own admission above, so what are you babbling about?
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Your question was; "When was the last time you flew something /U on a long cross country flight and tuned and identified a VOR, out of curiosity?" The last time I tuned and identified a VOR enroute it was not done out of curiosity, it was done because I intended to use that VOR for navigation. The last time I tuned one out of curiosity was probably during one of my solo cross countries for my private, that would be 42 years ago.
 
roncachamp said:
Your question was; "When was the last time you flew something /U on a long cross country flight and tuned and identified a VOR, out of curiosity?" The last time I tuned and identified a VOR enroute it was not done out of curiosity, it was done because I intended to use that VOR for navigation. The last time I tuned one out of curiosity was probably during one of my solo cross countries for my private, that would be 42 years ago.
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Not playing your stupid word games. I know you're not stupid and fully understood that common colloquial phrasing of a question.

We can continue to discuss the topic at hand or you can play your usual games and I'll go back to ignoring them. Your call.

Wait. VORs will fit in a hand? Hmmm. Or maybe that's a common phrase, too?

You knew full well the phrase meant that I was asking for my own curiosity. Don't play stupid. It doesn't suit you. Nor add anything to the discussion.
 
David Groat said:
I have another potentially unrelated question.

I've heard a couple times in this thread of 'some radials not working' or 'become useless' on VORs. It was always my understanding that VORs propagate signals in all directions, that all radials work or none do. Can VORs have blind spots? What is being talked about here?
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Many factors. Terrain. Magnetic anomalies in the earth's crust. When the FAA flight tests a VOR the accuracy of radials is held to a very strict standard, and if the equipment in the flight test plane indicates a deviation that fact is reflected in the Chart Supplement.

Bob
 
denverpilot said:
Not playing your stupid word games. I know you're not stupid and fully understood that common colloquial phrasing of a question.

We can continue to discuss the topic at hand or you can play your usual games and I'll go back to ignoring them. Your call.

Wait. VORs will fit in a hand? Hmmm. Or maybe that's a common phrase, too?

You knew full well the phrase meant that I was asking for my own curiosity. Don't play stupid. It doesn't suit you. Nor add anything to the discussion.
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Colloquialisms are often regional in nature. In the region where you live, apparently, "out of curiosity" is appended to a question when it serves no purpose. Where I live people understand questions are asked to satisfy curiosity.

If you truly wanted to discuss this topic you'd have answered the safety questions.
 
So, my takeaway from this (advice welcome) is: if you plan you use any VORs on your trip, or if you want to be sure they will be there for backup if you need, be sure to name them as waypoints in your itinerary; then, when you brief this flight at 800wxbrief, any relevant notams will be included in the notam section of the brief.
 
roncachamp said:
Colloquialisms are often regional in nature. In the region where you live, apparently, "out of curiosity" is appended to a question when it serves no purpose. Where I live people understand questions are asked to satisfy curiosity.

If you truly wanted to discuss this topic you'd have answered the safety questions.
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Sorry, I was prepping to leave to go schlep around some more of my dead brother in law’s stuff in my cargo trailer. I’m sure you were truly concerned about the possible safety problems of bad charts and have a direct line to someone who can fix it, so I apologize for any undue delay.

I answered the safety question. Letting bureaucracy get in the way of removing dead things nobody’s going to bother repairing ... will lead to someone being surprised the charted thing isn’t actually there, when they miss it in a twenty page wall of NOTAM text about national security BS and Stadium TFRs. Maybe a nice earning about MANPADs thrown in for good measure too. More NOTAMs is mo’ better, right?

No big deal if nothing else is going on. Add some weather changes, and other standard hazards of flying in the right order, and a bad chart will just be one more link in an accident chain.

The tech exists and works really well to do real time data updates. Been around for over a decade now, too.

That is, if they can even figure out how to log into their overly secured computers and touch type to do simple paperwork by then. We shall see.

Not holding my breath...

Why in the world would I want accurate charting like the free software that update in near real-time in virtually any other mapping product?

It’s okay. I’ll have a “hockey puck worth of safety”, soon. I feel all warm and fuzzy. It’ll be nice to feel warm and fuzzy in December after all.
 
It seems to me if the VOR is physically still there it should stay on the chart. Just like buildings, bodies of water, etc- if its there its on the chart.
 
denverpilot said:
I answered the safety question. Letting bureaucracy get in the way of removing dead things nobody’s going to bother repairing ... will lead to someone being surprised the charted thing isn’t actually there, when they miss it in a twenty page wall of NOTAM text about national security BS and Stadium TFRs. Maybe a nice earning about MANPADs thrown in for good measure too. More NOTAMs is mo’ better, right?

No big deal if nothing else is going on. Add some weather changes, and other standard hazards of flying in the right order, and a bad chart will just be one more link in an accident chain.
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Missing a NOTAM on a decommissioned VOR does not create a hazardous situation. At its worst, it's a minor inconvenience, it is not a safety issue.
 
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EminiTrader said:
It seems to me if the VOR is physically still there it should stay on the chart. Just like buildings, bodies of water, etc- if its there its on the chart.
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That's fine for the visual charts, for IFR charts they should stay if they remain part of the airway structure. PSI VORTAC should be depicted the same way as LAN VORTAC, with the frequency and channel crosshatched. These airways can still be assigned to aircraft that are RNAV capable, they just have to be advised the NAVAID is out.
 
roncachamp said:
That's fine for the visual charts, for IFR charts they should stay if they remain part of the airway structure. PSI VORTAC should be depicted the same way as LAN VORTAC, with the frequency and channel crosshatched. These airways can still be assigned to aircraft that are RNAV capable, they just have to be advised the NAVAID is out.
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I'm for them staying on either chart :)
 
I guess I am missing something. If you call WXBRIEF, or go to https://pilotweb.nas.faa.gov/PilotWeb/
And put in your route, you get a nice short list. And guess what, PSI is listed as being out.
Only if you include locations like KBED with 20 taxiways closed oes it run to 20 pages.

Tim
 
roncachamp said:
Missing a NOTAM on a decommissioned VOR does not create a hazardous situation. At its worst, it's a minor inconvenience, it is not a safety issue.
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They're not decommissioned. That's already been covered. There in a fake "we're acting like we are going to fix it" status for multiple years.
 
denverpilot said:
They're not decommissioned. That's already been covered. There in a fake "we're acting like we are going to fix it" status for multiple years.
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A distinction without a difference. Missing a NOTAM on an inoperative VOR does not create a hazardous situation. At its worst, it's a minor inconvenience, it is not a safety issue. There, feel better now?
 
roncachamp said:
A distinction without a difference. Missing a NOTAM on an inoperative VOR does not create a hazardous situation. At its worst, it's a minor inconvenience, it is not a safety issue. There, feel better now?
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It can be a safety issue. More so due to poor pilot planning. If you are in a VOR plane, or GPS is down.... and you are flying to your alternate in IMC and the VOR is down making you unable to complete the approach, you could be in a fuel exhaustion situation.

Tim
 
tspear said:
It can be a safety issue. More so due to poor pilot planning. If you are in a VOR plane, or GPS is down.... and you are flying to your alternate in IMC and the VOR is down making you unable to complete the approach, you could be in a fuel exhaustion situation.
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You won't be cleared via a VOR that is not in service.
 
So how do the controllers stay up on VOR status? Do you you use the same NOTAM system?
 
roncachamp said:
You won't be cleared via a VOR that is not in service.
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Not disagreeing. Just stating if you depend on a VOR routing, and the last VOR to fly the approach is out, you may have flown almost to your alternate before you find out. In which case, you better how you have enough extra fuel to get to a second alternate.
Like I said, this is mostly planning induced situation, but I could see it happening.

Tim
 
tspear said:
Not disagreeing. Just stating if you depend on a VOR routing, and the last VOR to fly the approach is out, you may have flown almost to your alternate before you find out. In which case, you better how you have enough extra fuel to get to a second alternate.
Like I said, this is mostly planning induced situation, but I could see it happening.

Tim
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I wouldn't think there would be an approach chart published using the VOR.
 
roncachamp said:
Missing a NOTAM of a decommissioned VOR may be inconvenient but it is not a safety issue. It should not be removed from the charts if it is part of the airway structure, it should be noted that it is not in service.
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If the VOR is decomissioned, how is it still part of the airway structure? There may some co-located GPS fixes at the same location of the fixes defined by the decomissioned VOR, but GPS fixes use an entirely different navigation mechanism, and to my limited understanding, constitute another, different, airway structure.
 
Kritchlow said:
I wouldn't think there would be an approach chart published using the VOR.
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There are lots of them. Many are being slowly removed. But do not forget, GPS is new. And most IFR approaches were designed around non-precision VOR.
So until a GPS approach can be designed (and the TERP criteria are not the same), and charted, then when the VOR goes down, you lose IMC access to that airport.

Tim
 
Well shucks, it's been a while since I've looked at a sectional, but I remember PGS?? (Peach Springs) being decommissioned yet still on the chart. That said, it was notated well for all to see. Can't remember but perhaps lines through the information box??
 
tspear said:
There are lots of them. Many are being slowly removed. But do not forget, GPS is new. And most IFR approaches were designed around non-precision VOR.
So until a GPS approach can be designed (and the TERP criteria are not the same), and charted, then when the VOR goes down, you lose IMC access to that airport.

Tim
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Whoa... there are published VOR approaches to airports, but the VOR (functionality) no longer exists??
 
Kritchlow said:
Whoa... there are published VOR approaches to airports, but the VOR (functionality) no longer exists??
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Yup, I know of a few where the plate still exists but the VOR is notamed out.
 
Bill Jennings said:
Yup, I know of a few where the plate still exists but the VOR is notamed out.
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Now that is flat out not good. When this thread started I thought everyone was making too much out of this. Apparantly not.
 
tspear said:
Not disagreeing. Just stating if you depend on a VOR routing, and the last VOR to fly the approach is out, you may have flown almost to your alternate before you find out. In which case, you better how you have enough extra fuel to get to a second alternate.
Like I said, this is mostly planning induced situation, but I could see it happening.
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But you are disagreeing. How can you depend on a VOR routing you won't be cleared for?
 
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