I’m sure it is me. I am not asking the right question or wording it correctly or something but I still am missing something. I’ll just have to try to figure out a way to describe it correctly to the students.
Thanks
How about this?
Imagine an airport in a perfect circular valley. The climb gradient will protect you from hitting the ridge line surrounding you in all directions.
However, you can still turn and circle all you like for the climb inside the valley and never hit anything ever. Start the turn at 400, or the top of the climb gradient, it makes no difference.
As long as you don’t aim at the ridge line.
Purely hypothetical of course, but it teaches that the climb gradient isn’t protecting the turn altitude at all. It’s protecting from a perfectly circular obstacle perhaps, all the way around the airport.
Now make the perfect circle infinitely high wall except in one 20 degree arc. It’s still the original height. Now the climb gradient will include a heading toward that notch.
You can still turn whenever you want to, but you’ll have to fly the heading and climb gradient to go over the low spot.
Or... they’ll alternatively publish a full departure procedure to take you through the notch.
The turn without a heading is meaningless other than there’s something in some direction that needs to be outclimbed. The only way to know for sure what it is, is a VFR chart. It’s inside the normal gradient plane is ALL you really know from the climb requirement.
If there’s a published departure procedure and you’re on it, you then know specific altitudes for MEA, etc.
You also have the published MSA circle on any approach plates for that airport which will give a major hint at which direction the obstacle(s) is/are.
Without a heading published, when to turn isn’t determined by the departure gradient required. You determine that from other information and planning. You just have a nice piece of info that if you can maintain the gradient you will miss whatever it is. You don’t know where it is at ALL from a generic climb gradient requirement.
Is that hypothetical helpful at all?