A PAR is a great exercise in precise aircraft control. You don’t have needles to chase, so you must smoothly and precisely fly specific headings while simultaneously making small pitch and power adjustments to track the correct vertical path. As you’ll see, following the controller’s verbal commands forces you to use the control-performance method of instrument flying. Instead, I hoped to use the PAR to make an important point about instrument flying. But for this video, I didn’t want to reference LOC and GS displays. Often when pilots fly a PAR, they load the corresponding ILS for the runway as backup. Instead, the critical details for radar procedures are shown in the “radar minimums” listings in the Terminal Procedures Publication for each region in which radar approaches are available. You just can’t touch down on the runway at the end of the approach. The controllers need to practice guiding aircraft in, and they’re usually happy to provide the service. Some military facilities allow civilian aircraft to fly practice PAR approaches. Most of those procedures are at military bases, and the armed forces still use PAR in daily operations. In the U.S., only about 100 approaches with “radar minimums” remain in the system. But as I’ll explain a bit later, flying PAR approaches is still an excellent exercise. Although a PAR could be useful in an emergency, as in those films, today it’s unlikely that you’ll have a radar approach available nearby if your primary navigation equipment fails. The radar displays and other electronics have been updated since, but the basic process remains the same even today. You can see dramatized, but realistic depictions of PAR in movies, such as the conclusions of Strategic Air Command, starring Jimmy Stewart, and the first film in the Airport franchise, released in 1970. PAR were standard practice, especially at military airfields in the decades following World War II. But as that plan came together, I didn’t use the VTF option in the GTN. As you’ll hear, I told the approach controller that I could accept vectors to the final approach course instead of flying a feeder route or course reversal. This approach also helps illustrate another useful technique. That’s the point at which you can leave the MDA and continue to the runway in a stable, normal descent. By design, the intersection of the advisory glidepath and MDA typically puts you close the charted visual descent point (if a VDP is available). Indeed, on this day, with the airport itself essentially in the clear, had I really wanted to land, I could have canceled IFR well out along the final approach course and followed the tower’s instructions to enter a VFR traffic pattern.īut in actual IMC or marginal VMC, when I descend using an advisory +V glidepath, I use the point at which I reach the MDA as the missed approach decision point. But that strategy might have left me too high to make a smooth, stable descent to the runway. On this day, had I intended to land, I could have leveled off at the MDA and continued toward the published missed approach point, and I probably would have been in the clear before I reached the threshold. That capability lets me fly almost all approaches using the same profile and aircraft configuration that I use for an ILS or RNAV approach with LPV minimums. The GTN shows +V to indicate an advisory descent path when you load a procedure like the RNAV (GPS) RWY 35. Although the weather was mostly good VMC, and the Olympia airport was operating under VFR during my flight, as you’ll see, I had to go missed on the approach when I reached the MDA on this LNAV-only procedure because just one cloud blocked the view of the runway.īecause I have a WAAS-capable Garmin GTN 750Xi in the panel, I almost always have at least advisory vertical guidance when I fly an approach. In this video, I fly the RNAV (GPS) RWY 35 approach at Olympia, WA ( KOLM), southwest of Seattle.
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