For Ed at 6Y9 - Poor Man's ILS

[TangoWhiskey]

Ed,

Attached is the Poor Man's ILS document I was telling you about. Mr. Joel Premselaar of Sisters, OR (click link to read about this fascinating Naval aviator) provided it for us, hoping it might help you build a plywood-based "VASI" tool for 6Y9. If you build it with reflective tape for the stripes, OR mask off the stripes area and paint the rest of the board with reflective paint, it could be very visible at night with a landing light on it. I think if you extend the stripes around to the back side of the boards, you could even get a good "initial setting" by sighting from the backside "back up" the glideslope you want to produce (clear of the trees).

These were used by the US Navy in California and Pacific Islands, and this one is unique in that it provides a pseudo-localizer in addition to glideslope-like guidance. On May 14, 1958, Mr. Premselaar ejected from F4D-1 Skyray BuNo 134762 after a flight control crankpin failed.

Hope this helps!! I did a lot of research about the plywood VASI's mentioned in the AIM, and finding plans for such are next to impossible! I bet some of the pilots would be willing to come back up and help you install and calibrate it!

If you want to thank Joel, his email address is on the plans. I told him that if we (you) built a version, we'd send him some photos...

 

[EdFred]

No electricity at 6Y9, pretty easy to do with plywood. Might as well put that A in geometry to use.

 

[gismo]

No electricity at 6Y9, pretty easy to do with plywood. Might as well put that A in geometry to use.

If you want to provide for night landings, you could probably go solar. But I can't see many folks wanting to get in there in the dark anyway.

 

[gismo]

Ed,

Attached is the Poor Man's ILS document I was telling you about. Mr. Joel Premselaar of Sisters, OR (click link to read about this fascinating Naval aviator) provided it for us, hoping it might help you build a plywood-based "VASI" tool for 6Y9. If you build it with reflective tape for the stripes, OR mask off the stripes area and paint the rest of the board with reflective paint, it could be very visible at night with a landing light on it. I think if you extend the stripes around to the back side of the boards, you could even get a good "initial setting" by sighting from the backside "back up" the glideslope you want to produce (clear of the trees).

These were used by the US Navy in California and Pacific Islands, and this one is unique in that it provides a pseudo-localizer in addition to glideslope-like guidance. On May 14, 1958, Mr. Premselaar ejected from F4D-1 Skyray BuNo 134762 after a flight control crankpin failed.

Hope this helps!! I did a lot of research about the plywood VASI's mentioned in the AIM, and finding plans for such are next to impossible! I bet some of the pilots would be willing to come back up and help you install and calibrate it!

If you want to thank Joel, his email address is on the plans. I told him that if we (you) built a version, we'd send him some photos...

I don't see how you could make this work for both lateral and vertical guidance with one set of boards. I think it would have to be located on the runway centerline and in the touchdown zone which would make it a bigger hazard than not having one. I could see how one could make two sets, one for vertical alongside the runway and one for lateral well before or beyond the runway ends though.

 

[Pjsmith]

I don't see how you could make this work for both lateral and vertical guidance with one set of boards. I think it would have to be located on the runway centerline and in the touchdown zone which would make it a bigger hazard than not having one. I could see how one could make two sets, one for vertical alongside the runway and one for lateral well before or beyond the runway ends though.

With wind, heaving, expansion, etc., just how exacting will the plywood localizer be? That said, couldn't you simply move the two rear boards inward each a few degrees? At 1/2 or a 1/4 mile out that should be enough overlap to tell you if you are grossly off course, while still showing correct if you are grossly on course. As you get closer and the angle of lateral view changes too much to make this accurate, shouldn't you be looking more down the runway anyway (given that this is a day vfr flight)? I didn't get an A in geometry, but seems to me that you should be able to get it close enough with one set of boards

 

[TangoWhiskey]

With wind, heaving, expansion, etc., just how exacting will the plywood localizer be? That said, couldn't you simply move the two rear boards inward each a few degrees? At 1/2 or a 1/4 mile out that should be enough overlap to tell you if you are grossly off course, while still showing correct if you are grossly on course. As you get closer and the angle of lateral view changes too much to make this accurate, shouldn't you be looking more down the runway anyway (given that this is a day vfr flight)? I didn't get an A in geometry, but seems to me that you should be able to get it close enough with one set of boards

It worked for the Navy! I guess you'd have to build one to know for sure. Somebody could probably configure one on FS2004 if they know how to use the landscape editor.

 

[gismo]

With wind, heaving, expansion, etc., just how exacting will the plywood localizer be? That said, couldn't you simply move the two rear boards inward each a few degrees? At 1/2 or a 1/4 mile out that should be enough overlap to tell you if you are grossly off course, while still showing correct if you are grossly on course. As you get closer and the angle of lateral view changes too much to make this accurate, shouldn't you be looking more down the runway anyway (given that this is a day vfr flight)? I didn't get an A in geometry, but seems to me that you should be able to get it close enough with one set of boards

I suppose you could provide a course that's angled across the runway at a small angle with the guidance on one side, but a line is a line and there's just no way to create lateral guidance from the side of the runway without an offset and/or an angle between the course guidance and the runway centerline. An angled course could bring you directly over the centerline at some fixed distance from the end but you'd have to make a turn at that point to remain on the runway centerline. The size of the angle would be a function (tangent) of the lateral distance from the runway center to the boards and the longituidanal distance from the boards to the point where the guidance line crossed the runway centerline. A 3° angle would require that the crossing point (where you would turn to the runway heading) be 2000 feet from the boards if the boards were 100 ft from the runway center. Three degrees doesn't sound too bad although that does make the turn equivalent to your flare relative to a 3° glidepath. I suspect that an offset would be worse since you'd have to make two turns to jog over to the centerline.

 

[GeorgeC]

Apologies in advance for necroposting... It's easy enough to come up with relative dimensions for this sort of thing, but does anyone know how large the actual panels should be? I think I saw these down at KFRR. edit: looking at W50 in google earth, it looks like 6' panels, 50' apart.

 

[Jaybird180]

What are the TERPS mins for this ILS?

 

[flyingron]

We had them at just about every airport in Maryland for a while (I think the state must have paid for them). My guess is that each one is about the size of a sheet of plywood (4x8).

 

[flygirl34q]

So did this ever happen to get built at 6Y9?? The link no longer works!