jspilot
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- Oct 22, 2011
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jspilot
All I'm saying is that I take notes on the pertinent data for SEVERAL airports that I might need to divert to so that I can look up what's necessary as quickly as possible on my kneeboard, not because I'm sweating bullets or have a misplaced sense of urgency, and I'm not saying that having to look something up in a book during flight is always bad. I'll submit to your experience, but I seems less likely that this task is designed to test your ability to look up data quickly in the A/FD, as it is designed to be able to test your ability to figure out where you are at any point during the flight, find your new heading and estimate time en route and fuel burn.
As others have pointed out, it can be difficult to find the info for the airport your looking for in a timely manner. Some people may be perfectly happy doing 360's while they flip through pages in a book, but I'd rather know that information sooner IF POSSIBLE so that I can focus the majority of my attention on commanding the aircraft, as you said.
It is completely impractical to have enough information written down before each cross country flight for several different airports. I you fly the same route over and over again to the same few airports then maybe your solution is practical but beyond that it is absurd to assume pilots should be prepared with evey relevant detail about every airport along the route.
Plus, if the person has Foreflight, it literally takes 10 seconds to look up this information and it has the AFD built in. I'm Not sure what the problem is with looking up the TPA that way.
I'm sure others have learned this too buti was taught that a general rule of thumb to determine TPA is to take field elevation and add 1,000 ft. Unless their is complex airspace in the area this seems like a totally safe practice and is infact true for like 95% of the airports near me.